TITLE: Crystal Display
NAME: Karl Manning
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: karl@pemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl/index.htm

TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: crystald.jpg
ZIPFILE: crystald.zip
RENDERER USED: POVRAY v3.00e Windows 95
TOOLS USED: Paper, coffee, Jeweller's brochures
RENDER TIME: 9h 10mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133, 32M memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
This shows several objects created in the style of Swavoski crystal on display
in mirrored case.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
This is my first image created using version 3 of POVray, having used version 2
for the last year. Indeed, it would not have been possible to create this image
in version 2, as I have made extensive use of the #while looping directives.

The basic unit in the scene is the crystal ball, shown in the middle. This is
created by intersecting planes rotated within a #while loop.

This was squashed, stretched, and chopped about to form the other shapes. The
crystal colouring was created after a lot of time spent peering into jeweller's
windows. It is a very light greyish colour, with high incidence of refraction,
and some reflection.

The background mirror was simple enough to create by putting reflection up to
0.98, and using a hexagon pattern to prevent it from being too flat. However it
raised a question. What colour is a mirror ? I was looking at one for ages
before realising that it has no colour, but shows the colours of it
surroundings. I also then realised that it has to have something to reflect. I
changed the default background colour to a light yellow and created a bar with
the lights on it.

On a final (irrelevant !) note, until just before Christmas I had been using a
486 75mhz pc to generate my raytracing. This was getting a bit slow. So I went
and bought a pentium 133 (intel) - great, images which had been taking 2 hours
now took 5mins to create. Then the topic of glass was announced, pah, even on
max priority of rendering it took over 9 hours to generate this image, and
thats without anti-aliasing ! Looks like I'll just have to save for *another*
new pc !



Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net

16/2/97