TITLE: DaBomb - A Family Portrait
NAME: Sonya Roberts
COUNTRY: CanadaWEB PAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Soho/Lofts/1022


EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com
TOPIC: Math and Physics
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: dabomb.jpg
ZIPFILE: dabomb.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.01.watcom.Win32 Pentium Optimised

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to add file info and convert to JPG.
Texture Magic 0.95 for creation of some of the textures.
Torpatch for creation of the mice tails.
POVRay 3.01 Windows interface (with customized insert menu) for all coding and
test renders.

RENDER TIME: 


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200 w/64 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg Graphics
Card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A glass bell jar on the mantelpiece contains a preserved reminder of one of the
first steps of the atomic age.  Great-Aunt Marie Curie seems to be looking at
it with a look of faint disapproval, while in another photo Uncle Alfred and
Uncle Oppie discuss the family business.  A dish of Great-Aunt Marie's
wonderful radium has been left sitting on the mantel by some forgetful person. 
And, finally, to one side there lies an unframed photo of the memorial built at
the site of the family's first venture on foriegn soil.

Let's hope this family remains the stay-at-home hermits they're been of late. 
Let's also hope they clode down the family business.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Well, as neither Math nor Physics are areas in which I have much expertise, this
subject really stumped me for a while.  Then when I did have an idea (and no,
it wasn't this one) I almost procrastinated myself into not having any entry at
all for this round of the competition.  I'd started on the idea I did have
(which I'll be salvaging a good chunk of for the next round, so I won't go into
it in any detail here) at pretty well the last minute - the final week and a
half of the submittal period.  It was coming along slowly but well, when I
suddenly had an oppurtunity to take off for four days over the Canada Day Long
Weekend (Saturday, June 28th to Tuesday, July 1).  This, as you might imagine,
left me in a bit of a pickle...not enough time anymore to finsih teh image as
well as I wanted it to be done.

I decided to attempt finishing it anyways, and slogged away at it until the
afternoon of the 27, when I faced the fact that there was just no way I could
finish the planned image before I was to be taking off.

So...I salvaged what I could of all the most closelt related bits, and came up
with this idea instead.  So the actual assembly of THIS image is a bit rushed
and hasty, though some of the individual objects (notably the atomic bomb
muschroom cloud) took some time to develop.

The cloud, BTW, is created entirely of stretched, translated, and rotated
spheresm each a random shade of grey within a narrow range, and each having
it's own random transmit value.  The "glow" is created bt several light sources
tucked away within it.

The picture of Marie Curie, Alfred Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer were
downloaded off the internet, as was the picture of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
and the chart showing how a nuclear fission reaction develops.  It was this
chart's similarity in shape to a pedigree, by the way, that made me come up
with the "family" grouping idea.

The chart is mapped onto a ripply patch objects created with 3DS Max and
exported to POV format using WCVT2POV.

The two pictures frames are assembled out of simple prmitives, as is the bowl
containing the glowing halo.

Not quite up to my normal entry standard, but overall I'm moderatly pleased with
the final image.