TITLE: Heavy Water
NAME: S.T. McWhinnie
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: stubbs@dundee.net
WEBPAGE: http \\www.dundee.net\stubbs
TOPIC: elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: heavywat.jpg
ZIPFILE: heavywat.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.0, sPatch for figures and hoses, hand coding for lights and
Povray 3.1 specific commands 

RENDER TIME: 
    3h 0m 02s

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K-6 200 32 meg RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I learned what the topic for this contest round was, I immediately thought
what sort of aspects of water can I do something with- liquid, ice, rain,
steam, refraction clarity etc.  Then I thought about the heavy water used in
reactors- what was that stuff- is it still used?, and what is it like?  After a
little bit of research I ran across photographs with that eerie blue glow.  Aha
I thought, what a cool creepy color, and it will be a real challenge to model
with the new media commands with POV 3.1.  I tried to work in some
complementary color action (the muted orange, yellow and red) to counteract the
strong blue and provide enough interesting detail in the reactor room.  I did
not want to use any image maps for the textures, so everything is using the
procedural shaders.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started this image soon after POV 3.1 came out.  I thought that I was not
going to be able do a really good water, and I had already been messing with
refraction for a different contest, and was not really inspired to jump into it
again for this one. However, I really wanted to get into the scene description
language and learn its ins and outs, and I wanted to learn the POV textures
without using texture maps.  So I thought I'd using the new media commands and
find out how to structure the commands as I went along.  This proved to be a
good method for learning POV, however the interior media output is not obvious.
 I tried the emitting, adsorption and scattering with a whole bunch of
parameters, and could not get the glowing blue look of the reactor core I
wanted.  I ended up using animations with the parameters tied to the clock e.g.
scattering {4, clock*.25} to find just the right color/glow that I was looking
for.  Though the bulk of the image is made of CSG objects; I used sPatch for
the human figures and hoses.