TITLE: In the Flask
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmlab.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmlab.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 

    PaintShop Pro 5.1 (jpeg conversion)

RENDER TIME: 

    Each of 5 trees: About 3m 30s
    Scene: 40h 17m 16s
    Total: 40h 34m 46s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A chemistry laboratory, with a rather unusual experiment in
recursion taking place.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Conceptually this just grew out of random bits of lab equipment.
Before I had an idea for a scene, I started modelling flasks and
test tubes. Then I had the idea of putting the camera inside a
flask - but a test render showed you couldn't *tell* the camera
was inside a flask! So I hit on the idea of putting the *lab*
inside the flask, and went from there.

The room and windows are vaguely reminiscent of my old chem lab
classes at uni. All of the objects are constructed with CSG of
primitive shapes, though the geometry got very hairy at times.
Lots of trig calculations. I've used layered textures to make
things appropriately grimy, but the glassware is all pretty
clean, as it should be. The textures need more work, but time
was too short.

The trees in the background were made using a recursive fractal
macro I wrote originally for the Gardens round (but never used!).
Each of these trees contains 32,418 objects. To save render time
in the scene, I rendered each of 5 different trees individually
and used them several times as image-maps in the final scene.
It's no Giles Tran macro, but I'm proud that I wrote it myself,
and I hope to improve it over time.

The lighting comes from a series of area lights on the ceiling.
That, combined with all the glassware, the caustics, the
anti-aliasing, pushed the render time way up. This is nowhere
near as complete as I'd like it, but I really ran out of time.

As usual, all this is hand-coded in the POV-Ray text editor,
and all the source code is in the zip file. This includes the
source used to make the trees.