TITLE: Armagedon Lightning Bolt - level 18
NAME: Miroslav Hundak
COUNTRY: Croatia
EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr
WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: autcast.jpg
ZIPFILE: autcast.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Milimeter paper and 0.5 carbon pencil

RENDER TIME: 
    see under description

HARDWARE USED: 
    see under description


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

On this image you are suposed to see an interior of a mean looking castle
tower, who's exterior is alegedly seen in the distance. The central piece is
a clear crystal sphere without any special features, except that it is 
conviniently seated on something that shouldn't be standing still anyway,
cause of a gravity pull, see? Anyhow, this sphere seems to be emanating some
sort of magical field going upwards to the sky. The same effect can be seen
happening in the tower in the distance. And in case you're wondering, yes
that is an axe on the wall.
Image is nothing fancy, but I kind of like it.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I did this as simple as possible. Of all the scenes I made for this
competition, this one took me the least time to build, and most time to
render, which is no wonder when you consider the soft shadows from area
light, large portion of the image being covered by a refracting transparent
object, camera surounded by some heavy CSG, a large halo on top of
everything and finaly +a0.2 option for antialiasing.
I was unable to use my Pentium over the night so I had to use the less
powerfull laptop for nightly rendering, which is why render time turned out
to be more complicated and relative to machine. Here are the times:

486/66            1d 16h 55m 01s 202 lines
  P/100               13h 51m 39s 120 lines
486/66                9h 48m 20s  25 lines
  P/100 app.    3h 30m           23 lines
  P/100                9h 21m 14s  44 lines
486/66                10h 28m 16s  22 lines
  P/100                14h 11m 57s 113 lines
486/66                8h 04m 37s  18 lines
  P/100 app.    4h 00m          33 lines
---------------------------------------
total         4d 18h 11m 04s 600 lines

Very long time, isn't it?

If you are very expirienced in all this you might notice a few glitches in
the image. One is that the sky is red, but the ambient light I used is
greenish-blue, as in the real world, but that's not very important anyway.
Second, more serious, glitch is that, since the objects in scene would anyway
cover the ground plane, there isn't any. However in the sphere located
inside the distant tower you can see the whole gradient of sky sphere
refracted through the glass, the upper part and the lower part too, which
should be obscured by the ground plane.
These glitches are only smaller ones, so I decided that going through the
rendering process all over again would be just a bit over the top
for my sanity.