EMAIL: michaelg@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu NAME: Michael Guslick TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: Povray 3 for Linux TOOLS USED: Graph paper, pencil and a few curse words RENDER TIME: 46 hours 25 minutes HARDWARE USED: AMD 386DX-40 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "It is the weapon of a Jedi Knight..." This is my own lightsaber design, created for a Star Wars roleplaying game that I'm in. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The whole thing started out as doodling during one of my more boring classes. I actually drew most of it up on Cadkey and FastSolid (an ACIS-based solid modeler for Cadkey) to see if I really liked the design. I tried rendering it in Trispectives, but I wasn't very impressed with the output (besides, I hate using Windoze...). So I thought I'd give Povray a try (yes, this is my very first work with Povray!). Trispectives does allow you to output a file in Povray 2.x format, so I gave that a try. Well, Povray 3 did not like the file at all. It gave me a lot of warnings while parsing and finally gave up at the end. I took a look at the file (about 1.5 megs!) and saw that it was chock full of these "smooth_triangle" thingies.... Hmm... Looks like I need to learn how to use POVRAY and just rebuild the whole thing.... I started by taking the CAD drawings that I had made and made a ton of grid lines over the various views of the model. I then started typing everything in, starting with the easy stuff (the cylinders used to make up the rear). Everything on the lightsaber was created using CSG, as I can't comprehend doing a model any other way... I threw a halo in for the blade very early on, and I was impressed with how good it looked. After a point, I had gotten comfortable enough with POVRAY to improvise various features that I hadn't originally thought of (like the dimples on the two copper colored rings on the focusing head). I added a few little LEDs to the activation button housing as well, but I'm not real pleased with how they turned out - note the little fringes of red at the tips of one of the green LED triangles - I'm not sure why they appeared there (any ideas?). I played with a lot of different metal textures (practically every one that came in the .inc files) and finally settled on a few different chromes, a copper and a bronze. I used just a little bumpiness on two of the chrome areas of the main body to give a break from the straight metal finishes on the other parts. I had originally planned on doing a very worn finish (like a plated metal flaking off of a slightly different base metal), but I haven't figured out how to do that yet... I also wanted to make the brown handgrip look like leather or finely textured vinyl, but I settled on using a wood texture - at the camera distance, you can't tell that it's wood anyhow. Then I needed a floor. I wanted to do something that looked like the shiny black floors of the Death Star, so I made a bunch of big flat superellipsoids and a simple plane for the grout. I gave the tiles a very gentle bump setting to distort the reflection slightly and used the F_Metal_C finish to give the tiles a nice shiny look. Throwing in a few scuffs & scrapes on the floor might make it a little more realistic, but I'm also not quite sure as to how I'd do that.... For lighting, I simply used two point lights. I thought it looked pretty good, even though I had originally planned much more complex lighting. Unfortunately, my 386 isn't quite up to the task (extra lighting seems to be more of a drag than antialiasing). So there you have it - my first decent Povray rendering. Not exactly great, but I'm still working on it.... May the Force be with you, - Michael P.S. - Has anyone out there come up with a utility to export .SAT files to .POV files? Trispectives' .POV abilities are broken at best...