TITLE: The electro-physicist
NAME: Daniel Beeston
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: danielbeeston@geocities.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/6042
TOPIC: Physics and Maths
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: electro.jpg
ZIPFILE: electro.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.01 for Dos

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 2.5b, Deluxe Paint 2 Enhanced, sparks

RENDER TIME: 
    about 60 hours ish

HARDWARE USED: 
    486dx 120 for modelling, P100 for final Render

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Some nutty Electro-physicist has finally managed to get his coffee machine
working. I dunno, What? I'm supposed to model this picture AND think up
some drivel to substantiate it?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I drew up the scene on paper to get an idea of where to place everything.
I modelled the machine in moray 2.5b. Put a point light in each orb. Then I
put a spotlight in the big orb and shone it onto the figure. It is the only
light that interacts with the atmosphere. The figure was done with the
backdrop function in moray 2.5b. I drew up a quick figure in dpaint then
loaded the picture into the background of moray. I traced around it with the
prism object (a really thin one). It took two sessions of approx. 2-3 hours
to model the machine. Another 1 and a half to texture it. A couple of hours
for fiddly special effects (the atmosphere and electricity) including the
lightning spark, then an hour or so for the figure. Oh and another hour
discovering that the radiosity function is really hard to use and wouldn't
really help my picture anyway (sigh). On a final note it continued to give
fatal exeption errors when I tried to render it. I just kept rendering it
with the +c option on and eventually it finished.