TITLE: Ancient Papyrus Fragment Under Magnifying Glass NAME: Bob Sewell COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: bob.sewell@viponline.com WEBPAGE: http://network3000.com/bob/ JPGFILE: bs-frag.jpg TOPIC: Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bs-frag.jpg ZIPFILE: bs-frag.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.00e for Windows TOOLS USED: Moray 2.02.wat, MS Paint 95, MS Image Composer, LViewPro, Photoshop 2.5 LE RENDER TIME: 23 hours, 59 minutes, 15 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133MHz with 64MB RAM, 256K Cache IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An ancient papyrus with Greek lettering is under study in the wee hours of the morning. A glass of red wine provides the only cheer for the scholar in his dim room, lit by a candle and oil lamp which fill the air with a light cloud of smoke. An artist is never satisfied with his/her work. As the final render takes place on the deadline date of Feb 28, I see things that need improvement. The fragment is not lit very well, and parts of the wine glass and lamp are dark, which indicate a need to increase the max_trace_depth global setting. But, since this took almost exactly 24 hours to render, I don't have time to re-do it. May the judges be merciful! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used Moray to model the lamp, candle and holder, wine glass and the magnifying glass. The glass bodies of the lamp and wine glass were modeled in separate sections so that I could use a smaller copy of the main body of each--with a colored glass texture--to simulate the amber oil and ruby-colored wine. The table, chair and cabinet were Moray model files which either came with Moray or I downloaded from somewhere on the internet, and the author(s) are unknown. If you recognize them as your own, even though I changed the color and otherwise modified them, I thank you, and wish you would tell me who you are--I'd like to swap some of my .MDL files with you! The wallpaper pattern was drawn in MS Paint 95 and converted to GIF format by LViewPro. The papyrus fragment was also created in MS Paint 95. A wrinkle texture was added using MS Image Composer, then MS Paint 95 was again used to erase the edges in a ragged fashion. LViewPro was then used to convert it to GIF and mark the background as transparent. I am not satisfied with the way POVray handles the transparency of a GIF image, since it left that portion black rather than transparent. I hope the viewer will interpret this as if the fragment was mounted on a sheet for preservation purposes. The flames are modified versions of the flame used in Dan Farmer's MATCHES.POV file which came with POVray. I decreased the number of lights and decreased their falloff rate to dim their effect. Finally, I added a type 1 atmosphere with very large distance and very small scattering values. I just wanted enough to make the flames show up without fogging up the scene too much. Also, too much atmosphere tended to wash out the cabinet behind the lamp, which looked horrible. I wonder if it is possible to localize an atmosphere to within a small are? If so, I'd have put it only inside the chimneys to make the flames visible and left it out of the rest of the room. Adding atmosphere increased render time by 600 Photoshop 2.5 LE was used for adding the title, name and copyright, as well as converting the final image to JPEG format. Most textures were from the standard include files from the POVray 3.00e package. Any others are included in the zip file for this image. The only file not included was the actual 2MB .INC file used for the wall candle's chimney, but I do include my smaller test .INC file that I used while proof-rendering, 'cause it loads and renders faster. I am a recent convert to POVRay for Windows (having worked with Polyray for three years) and I must say the power and flexibility of POVRay is superior to Polyray, although I admit the fault may be my own--it may have been due to my inability to unleash Polyray's power. Either way, for me POVRay for Windows makes raytracing much easier while giving the image results I've been yearning for. Oh, and one more thing: To Mssrs. Lutz & Kretzschmer, I like Moray a lot, but in the next version can you 1) allow the user to define the Y-axis as up instead of Z? I have a hard time thinking in that orientation. And 2) tell me how to get it to put the objects at the origin when exporting to POVRay instead of 'way down at -39 or something? Let me move the object away from the origin instead of having to search for wherever Moray put it. I'm probably just doing something wrong, but...