TITLE: Plastic
NAME: Robert Lee
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
JPGFILE: plastic.jpg
ZIPFILE: plastic.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    IFranView, Little Gray Cells


RENDER TIME: 
    about 4 hrs 34 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    2.4 GHz Pentium on Windows 2000


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In 1912 a German chemist, Fritz Klatte, let a mixture of
hydrogen chloride and mercury sit in the sun.  A milky sludge
formed and then solidified.  The material was patented, but
discarded as not very useful.  The material Klatt threw away
was vinyl chloride. In the 1930's a varient of the substance,
polyvinyl chloride was developed.  This new substance, PVC,
was the forerunner of plastic, without which the modern 
industrialized nations could not function.  Historical
material taken from "Connections" by James Burke.

I submit that not only is plastic a key ingredient of many 
great inventions; but, plastic itself is a great invention.
Once plastic's basic properties were discovered, our lives
accelerated. Now we have to keep up with change every day
as new products are developed.  Our world changes at an ever- 
increasing rate as plastic is bent, shaped, and molded into 
a variety of forms. Plastic allows common, everyday items to
be reinvented every day. If you looked around, you could 
identify at least ten things within your view that are made 
of plastic.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All the shapes are fairly standard.  The glass pipes
are sphere sweeps.  The jars and flasks are lathe objects.
The paper pad is made up of two bicubic patches that are
warped at one corner.  The frost and condensation around the 
large gray cylinder is made up of an invisible cylinder 
and lathe object that holds media.

The landscape outside the window is a height field I had
used from a previous entry.  I really wanted a tree in that
window, but could not get it to work.  Oh well.

There is a shadowless light outside to shine on the clouds 
and an area light to shine in the window.  I had a problem 
when adding the area light outside and had to solve the 
problem by using a light group to include the gas hose and
tank, coffee cup, chemical pipes, and right hand wall.  
There is a key area light to the right to cast a few shadows, 
and there is a fill light, shadowless, just above the camera.

Radiosity: I used the follwoing radiocity settings:                
        pretrace_start 0.08
        pretrace_end   0.008
        count 50  
        error_bound 0.5
        recursion_limit 4
        nearest_count 1
        gray_threshold 0
        brightness 1.5    
        media on
        normal on 
        always_sample off
        save_file "PlasticsRad1"

IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.