TITLE: Tycho Brahe NAME: Francois Dispot COUNTRY: France EMAIL: wozzeck@club-internet.fr WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/vienna/7709 TOPIC: Math and Physics COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: fdtycho.jpg ZIPFILE: fdtycho.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01 TOOLS USED: --- RENDER TIME: 2d 5h 46m 24s HARDWARE USED: Cyrix P166+ w/ 32Mb Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer of the 16th century, who devellopped new models of the universe, that led Kepler to his own laws. You will learn much more about him at the Galileo project web site. This picture is quite close to a drawing of Tycho Brahe in his own observatory. Several instruments of his time can be seen in the back of the picture. Most of them were of big size, because Tycho Brahe thought that instruments had to be large to be precise. Thus the large size of the quadrant in front of the picture. INI file options: Antialias=On Sampling_Method=2 Antialias_Depth=2 Antialias_Threshold=0.1 DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: As usual, everything was designed by hand with CSG. The lighting of the scene was a hard -and perfectible- job, since I didn't want the front walls to cast shadows on the rear ones. In fact, global "no_shadow" schemes were not the good choice. I then decided to have the scene lit from the back (as the sun would have done), with a second light in front of the scene to moderate the shadows. This time, the front light is shadowless, and some ambient/diffuse tuning was necessary. The light ray was made using a halo: atmospheric rendering would have been too long to render, and would have driven me to put the "sun" light at a wrong place. By the way, you will note that perspective had to be cheated sometimes... at least three times in fact: try to figure out where and why! A nice part is the table with its cloth. To model the folds, I had to design a "new" quartic. I think it was well-known long before me, but I had never seen it before and I found it really useful (cf. quadrant.inc). The nicest part to me is the caption. Like the whole scene, it was made with CSG. The text is not a mapping; it was made using the "text" object, and 3 different fonts (A standard one, another for the "_", and the last for the "AE" letters).