EMAIL: ayk@students.cs.mu.oz.au NAME: Adrian Koh TOPIC: The Laboratory COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Don't try this at home ... COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: none yet RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1g ( for linux ) TOOLS USED: The gimp ( for adding copyright text and converting to jpeg ) RENDER TIME: 9 minutes 48 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is the first time I've entered the competition so I wished to keep to a moderately straightforward theme. All in all, the image turned out much better than I first anticipated. I'm hoping that the pink puddle of liquid, the test tube spilling corrosive green liquid and the black ( burn? ) marks on the floor and wall will signal to the viewer that the experiments occurring here are not very safe. What will happen to the liquid currently being heated? And thanks to my brother, G. Koh for suggesting the corrosive liquid from the test tube and the hole that it creates in the floor. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: ( Sorry if the description is overly long. It's not that I think I've done something amazingly grand, but I believe the spirit of the competition *is* about learning, so maybe what I've written may help someone with less experience. I sure know that it's been a long journey to get where I have - and there's still so much to learn :-) ). This image kind of came to me in parts. I originally set out doing the bunsen burner because I wanted to see if I could actually do an acceptable flame. I used an emitting media with a spherical color map. The media was enclosed by a hemisphere ( suitably scaled to produce the elongated flame). I also used a differently scaled version of this to represent the flame impacting on the bottom of the crucible. Thanks to Michael Hough who wrote a very good tutorial on using media for producing water. I found this invaluable for my understanding of how medias are used. The link to this tutorial is somewhere on the www.povray.org site. Once I'd created the bunsen burner , I added the tripod, gauze mat and crucible as elements which I thought complemented a bunsen burner. These, along with the bunsen burner and test tube are all constructed from simple primitives using CSG. I added the wall so that the viewer would not see too much of the plane ( which would make the image look too empty - a concept I also read from someone's tutorial but I can't remember where this was ). The wall is actually constructed from individual polygons so that I could have dividing strips between the planks and also so that I could randomly alter the wood texture from one plank to the next. The black stains are produced by a wrinkles normal pattern. The puddle of pink liquid and the test tube were added to contribute to the context of the image, and also to fill space. The puddle is produced by a macro I wrote a while ago for producing puddles ( first time I've used it in an actual scene, though ). The macro randomly places blob components in a grid but tries to constrain it so that the puddle is a smooth surface. I also used the puddle macro to cut the hole in the floor, since it gives a nice shape for this. The gas from the crucible and from the hole in the floor are both produced using emitting medias again. The medias are pretty much the same as the one used for the bunsen burner except for different color maps, scaling and turbulence. The liquid in the crucible is created by using an absorption media. The bubbles are randomly placed, semi-transparent spheres. The sizes of the spheres are also randomly different. The floor uses a layered texture. The bottom layer uses a quilted normal. The top layer has a semi transparent wrinkles pigment, plus a wrinkles normal. This top layer serves to make the black stains on the floor.