EMAIL: lrwii@joplin.com NAME: Leroy Whetstone TOPIC: Fire and Ice COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE:Ice Candle COUNTRY:USA WEBPAGE:http://leroywhetstone.s5.com JPGFILE: Candle.jpg ZIPFILE: Candle.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6 Windows TOOLS USED: jpeg conversion: Image Force by Cursor Arts Co. Triangle meshs: TRIANG by David Sharp lathe: SorLaT by me (on my web page) RENDER TIME: Todal: 31 minutes 50 seconds HARDWARE USED: Anthon 1.2Ghz 256 Meg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An Ice Candle, pure fire and ice. It was the frist thing that popped into my mind when I heard this rounds topic. SCENE : size: 480 * 580 antialias: threshold .1 method 2 depth 3 frame level objects: 21 DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For this round I wanted to make something look real. I thought that the simpler the shapes the more time I've have to get the lighting and textures right. It turns out I needed all the time I could get. The Lights: There are 3 light sources one above and the others where place to highlight the ice. The Background: This is where I got into trouble. I had a faint simple pattern as a working backgound while I was making the flame. The Flame developed specks. I worked real hard to get rid of them and I did. Then after I ran test, I wanted the background just a tad lighter. So I made ajustments and ran again and specks where back. So to hell with the background. The Flame: It's very hard to made great flame. I used a wax candle's flame as a refference. The trouble with any flame is the backgound will affect how a flame is made. So a flame made for one scene doesn't always work for another. I got into trouble of having a good looking flame ruin by a small change in the background. I used a lathe with multiple media to make this Flame. The First media has several densities the other only one. The First Media starts with an emission of 1. Most of the densities take away from this color. I use the lathe in an object pigment as base density to keep the other densities from hitting the object sides. There are several spherical densities placed close to each other to hollow out the center, and a gradient density to adjust the colors from top to bottom. The other media uses negative emission and absorption to add heat waves to the flame. The above is the end product of a lot of trial and error.I tried DF3, even wrote a c++ program to convert Height feild tgas into DF3 files. It made a fair cartoonish flame, but not what I wanted. The Candle: I tried using an isosurface CSG with a cone.It was slow and it was hard to get adjusted. What I settled on was an CSG of a cone with several cylinders and spheres.As I'm writing this I'm still adjusting the finish to get that ice look. The wick: The burning part is made of two Meshs with one scaled a little bigger with a texture that'll show parts of the inner Mesh. The part that is'nt burning is made of 5 spherical sweeps wrapped around each other. The drip: This was made with Blob CSG with the Candle. I use trace to place spheres for the blob. There are a few spheres I place by hand to smooth out the connection from the the drip to the water around the wick. I moved the blob a very small distance from the candle so the surfaces wouldn't coincide. The bubbles: These are sheres scaled and place by hand. Zip-File: Candle.zip epilogue: My hat's off to all of you who can take and work and rework a rendered scene until you get it perfect. I get what I call lazy eye. I get bored with a scene. This scene tried my patience. I had test render that ran 2 hours. I'm better at placing not so detail models. I do like to make models. Belive it or not POV-ray has taught me a little patience. (a 15 minute render is nothing) My web page has some basic tools for working with POV-ray. All the tools are written in C++ and are for Windows. Feel free to E-mail me with any comments and or suggests. If you e-mail me make sure you have POV in the subject or I WILL NOT read it.