EMAIL: jull43@ij.net, jull43@aol.com NAME: Matt Giwer (Matthias M. Giwer) TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: "Jewel Box of the Giants" COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/jull43 RENDERER USED: POV-Ray TOOLS USED: POV-Ray, Photoshop RENDER TIME: 9 hours and change or 2hr50m see below HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 333MHz, 128MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Inside the jewelry box of a Giant DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Many moons ago I tried lapidary as a hobby. That is expensive enough but the "perfect" rough to cut was even more expensive. Scratch one hobby. As a POV-Ray learner since December 1998* I found the perfect learning tool, gemstones. Perfect gemstones only cost time instead of dollars. And I came across the theme of imaginary worlds. And here I had pearls and cut stones and lots of experience in multiple reflections and then it was only fitting what I had available into the theme. Giant gemstones to Land of the Giants was an easy leap. And the TV show Land of the Giants was created in Hollywood which is another imaginary World so I was in two ways from Sunday. The colored diamonds are only an approximation of the right shape and are short a row of facets on the crown (the side with the flat spot called the table.) Other than that, they are quite busy enough for this image. Too many facets have a poor result in reality not to mention here. BTW: Do not object to colored diamonds. The Hope Diamond is as least as deep a blue as rendered here. And anyone objecting to the external face reflections, you have not looked at a faceted stone under a ten power loupe. This is a reasonable rendering. And most of the visual value of gemstones comes from moving them which is contrary to rendering save as an animation. From there on it was all hand placement and rotation, rendering individual and small groups of items and the occasional overnight rendering of the complete scene. I am not really happy with the black opal on the right. The colors should be more "glinting." But the fine chain for it came out perfectly in the rendering. It might be the most realistic thing in the entire scene. The "diamonds" are the intersection of superellipsoids of { 2, 2 } which is roughly a raw diamond crystal in itself. From there I rotate and scale to provide the facets. These improve up to max_trace_level 12 but of course takes forever to render individually, not to mention this complex scene. 6 is used for this scene. The colors were added for visual interest and the "emeralds" given their traditional 1:5/8 oval shape by simple scaling. The sheen from the pearls comes from twenty (overkill as there are not enough trace levels to get down to it) transparent concentric spheres each with the same texture with a solid sphere in the center. The solid sphere gets right a a tendency of the software to "fake" a caustic getting through even though no light could get through before ADC bailed out. The concentric spheres are an attempt to imitate nature as pearls are composed of such thin layers. They improve up to max_trace_level 20 but if there are other reflecting objects in the scene, the stack overflows. But if you increase the trace level you have to decrease the transmission as the "opalescent" effect increases with the number of internal reflections permitted. The "best" pearls pick of the tones of the person wearing them. This does so in spades. Perhaps too much for normal usage. The wood has no color of its own. It simply reflects only reds. It is an effect I like as it can exist but not add its color to the scene save as a function of other lights. In order to obtain the viewing perspective #declare place = 1*<3,2.75,4> camera { location place direction 1.25*z // slightly fisheye right 4/3*x look_at <0.0, 2.5, 0.0> // looking slightly down from the 2.75 high location through the 2.5 } This lets the eye look "up" and "down" at the scene. I am particularly happy with the way the detail on the "tubular" beads of the larger hanging ring came out. This was one of the happy accidents. It was an attempt at the smaller object in front of it with too many spheres specified. So they overlapped and gave interesting gold beads. Never throw away an interesting effect. Lighting is done by putting the entire scene and the lights inside a proportional "room" of six planes that intersect. Nothing special is done with them but they provide an ambient light in a realistic manner. What you see in the top center of the image is the intersection of a wall and the ceiling. The 1 and the .33 light both also illuminate the interior of the box. Photoshop was used to create the height map for the coin face. Adding copyright this way is a more interesting use of Photoshop than stripping it in as an afterthought. And besides, I get to use my ugly puss this way. And at first I thought my simple render model was terrible but then I pulled out my one Krugerrand and it was exactly like this. It is a collector not a trade coin so no raised edges nor knurled sides. The "texture" on the side of the coin stack is from reflections only. In the process of creating jewelry I came up with some quite interesting pieces but they had the annoying problem of requiring an hour to render a small segment of a 320x240 window. I have to put those off until the 3 (or 30) Gigahertz machines are invented. So will area lights as the one that comes with to insert increases the time by a factor of four although it is a much better scene. As to the rendering time, if I reboot the machine and load POVRay first, rendering takes just under 3 hours. But if I have been running the machine for a while and doing other things it will take a bit over 9 hours. I have no idea what is causing this difference yet. I have raised the issue on the pov-ray@povlab.org mailing list for insight. --- * If we ignore five years ago with a 486DX2/66 which lasted for three frustrating months and didn't get anywhere.