EMAIL: ice@teanow4pm.demon.co.uk NAME: Tom Nowacki TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Vertigo aka Archimedes' Screw COUNTRY: UK WEBPAGE: http://www.teanow4pm.demon.co.uk RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: sPatch RENDER TIME: 1 hour 23 minutes 27 seconds @ 1024 x 768 +a.1 HARDWARE USED: Pentium-200 MMX IMAGE DESCRIPTION: [From 1978 edition of "How It Works" volume 2.] The Archimedean screw has been used since ancient Egyptian times as a primitive method of lifting water. Essentially it consists of a screw thread surrounded by a close fitting water-tight cylinder. One end of this device is dipped into the water and the whole machine is rotated. Water in the thread at the bottom tends to be 'wound' up the axis of the machine until it spills out at the top, the action being like that of a continuous moving bucket. JACK AND JILL AT THE MILLENIUM 3000 AGRICULTURAL EXHIBITION ON MARS... Jack: The holo-text says it's an Archimedes' Screw. Jill: That's nice. Just who or what is an Archimedes? Jack: Archimedes? I think he was an ancient Earthling who lived in a place they used to call Greece. Jill: So why did they name that thing after him? Jack: Well, apparently this is how Archimedes used to irrigate his garden back on Earth. Jill: With an H2O bottle and a green screw? Jack: Sure, why not? Jill: Okay, to do you a favor, I will suspend my disbelief. What's the punch line? Jack: I'm glad you favor me that do. What part don't you believe? Jill: The part that Ancient Earthlings already had H2O bottles, and they probably didn't have screws either. Jack: Of course they had screws. How else would they have opened wine bottles if they didn't have corkscrews? Jill: Hmm. Jack: (playing the tour guide) You're right about one thing. Archimedes' sprinkler system didn't work properly, because there were no machines on Ancient Earth to power it, but in the cave beneath the garden which we will visit next, there was a crank handle that rotated the screw, as well as the barrel containing the H2O supply. You had to turn the handle very fast, otherwise the H2O column rising up in the bottle would fail to spurt out at the nozzle. "By ox-eyed Lady Here and laughter-loving Aphrodite," Archimedes panted wiping his brow, "I must return this leaky barrel to Diomedes in the 5th Century BC. He will be upset with if I don't." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: INVISIBLE DETAILS LOOK JUST RIGHT. The Spray. About a year or so ago I was fortunate to come across a paperback publication in a bookshop that was entirely devoted to the subject of creating realistic water effects in 3D Studio. I replaced the learn-ed book with an audible thunk, in my head. Jawohl, I was becoming a cynic. Just in the nick of time I was apprehended, and then released on bail, but the judge died before there could be any trial. I was a free man once more, or so I believed. A year or so later I was again staring into a similar abyss - it happens to me a lot, I reckon - and this time I was saved from my frustrated ignorance by the benevolence and wisdom of Chris Colefax who contributed Spray.inc to the Povray apocrypha. The Vortex. N.B. from Finland developed a loop for modelling the body of a toy dinosaur. Highly inspirational, I thought, and set to work. I adopted and this is crucial, adapted the loop to manufacture a blob with ridges in it that I combined with a whorl of turgescent bubbles of my own device... The Screw. There are those who would dispense with all their earthly goods and material possessions and spend the rest of their lives in a barrel. There are others who would say, it depends on the barrel though. Last but not lost there is also a small minority (I know they exist) who would argue unreasonably that there is no such thing as a barrel. I would never dispense with sPatch. The Terrain. Invisible detail #2. 1. Too much light from point sources can be harmful. 2. Some objects get overexposed more than others. 3. The worst offenders are multifaceted, nearly white and not quite invisible, viz. spray. The consequences may never be known in a cosmos where chaos reigns supreme and order is a bastard from nascence; so please don't take my word for it. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread (from Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' - 1711). But consider: <3,3,3>, the ambient_light setting. And likewise in the color_map I applied to the floor, there were a series of... What? Sorry, about that. Somebody just knocked on my door and asked me for some postage stamps. Where was I? Ah, yes... Bloopers. Quantum leaps? <1.64, 1.14, 0.92> I have given up trying to explain such glaring inconsistencies. I have come to accept them as part of our unnatural world, ad infinitum. 4. A good pattern type to emulate concentricity is "waves". The Bottle. #declare H2O= ior 1.33 The Stopper. rem - By Windows Setup SUMMARY: "What should the viewer conclude?" The artist replied evasively, "I have a sense of humor and something else. A good many people have neither and still get away with it, so at the very least I would expect the viewer to ask the next person he or she meets, a friend, a close relative, Elvis, merely an acquaintance, a total stranger: in the structure of your ethics, is preventing reproduction somehow more humane, or whatever your equivalent word is, than terminating the creatures directly?" $64,000: Is the screw turning, let me see now, clockwise or counterclockwise? I will accept the correct answer as proof that you are not a lazy person. Wrong answers will also be evaluated. SOURCES: In my sources.zip there are 3 files you need to put into the appropriate directory on your harddisk, which is assuming you would like to render Vertigo too.