TITLE: Transistor NAME: John COUNTRY: US EMAIL: jhu@sdf.lonestar.org TOPIC: Great Inventions COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: transist.jpg ZIPFILE: transist.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Povray 3.5, gimp for image reconstitution and jpeg conversion RENDER TIME: 3 hours HARDWARE USED: Celeron 800, Pentium 4 1.5 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The transistor is the foundation of modern computing, so I thought I'd pay tribute to it with this submission. This specific image is of a point-contact transistor. The point contact transistor was invented at Bell Labs in the mid 1950s. The inventors William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain won the 1956 Nobel prize in physics for this invention. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was quite a task. The entire image is full of CSG and a couple isosurfaces. The copper base is four separate isosurfaces with a brushed-copper metal textures applied to it. The wires are all toruses. Those were really difficult to get right as their positioning depends on a lot of rotations that just get confusing. The room was created in a fraction of the time it took to just get the wiring of the transistor correct. It's just a CSG of boxes. The chair isn't really a chair at all. Finally, there's a fuzzy picture of Shockly, Bardeen, and Brattain in the background.