TITLE: Ages Of Light NAME: Craig Barrett COUNTRY: South Africa EMAIL: trance@global.co.za TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: liteage.jpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max 2.5 default scanline renderer TOOLS USED: Photoshop 5, Kai's Power Tools 3 RENDER TIME: 2 03 25 HARDWARE USED: Pentium MMX 250MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image is a brief look at how man has lit his world through the ages, from the candle through the light bulb to the laser. Also in the image are some of the discoveries about light - the background interference pattern and the three freestanding images of interference patterns, the dispersion of light by a prism, Maxwell's electromagnetic equations and a circuit for the demonstration of the photoelectric effect (the latter are on the piece of paper and show the wave-particle duality of light, hence the "YET" next to the circuit diagram). The wave-particle duality is also shown by the wave and photons running through the image. The dark line inside the bulb is an artifact of the refraction in the material applied to the outer piece of glass I think the only way to get rid of it would be to increase the ray depth, but my machine isn't fast enough for me to do this, unless I don't mind waiting many more hours for the render to complete. DESCRITPTION OF IMAGE CREATION : The candle, candlestick and most of the light bulb (which consists of many separate objects. It is actually a complete model of a bulb, though not all the detail is visible in this image) were created using the same technique - create atube and make a reference clone of it. A MESHSMOOTH modifier is applied to the clone and an EDIT MESH to the original. The mesh of the original is then manipulated to get the basic shape, with the MESHSMOOTH giving the clone the final smooth shape. An in-depth tutorial of this technique (which we call the milkshake glass technique. See the tutorial and you'll know why) is available thanks to Ashton Mason at http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/~amason/silicon.trip/Tutorial. The candle flame consists of 3 combustion effects of different size and colour and inside the flame is the only light in the scene. The top part of the candle is lit with two target spots to give the impression of the light passing through the wax. The wave and photons have a TAPER modifier applied to them to give a greater impression of depth. The "interference" patterns were all created in Photoshop wit Kai's Power Tools 3 GRADIENT DESIGNER. The 3 free standing ones started out as 3 separate red-to-black, blue-to-black and green-to-black gradients which were then pasted together using different glues (so they're actually just variations of the same image).