TITLE: The Gate
NAME: Alexander Schmid
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: alex.schmid@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: http://home.t-online.de/home/alex.schmid/ray.htm
TOPIC: magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: asgate.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    My self written ray tracer

TOOLS USED: 
    xv, gimp, xpaint

RENDER TIME: 
    3 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    P133

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Sometimes you open a door to somewhere you for shure don't want to be....

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image was create with my self written ray tracer. If you look close
you may notice I spent much work for the details: for example look at the
flame, it not only changes it's color from blue to yellow it also changes
the degree of seeing through. Also take a look at the table cloth. It has
a structure through a specialy written shader.
There were some problems of course: i had to learn that it's not wise to
combine volumestepping (used for the smoke) and distribution ray tracing
(used for the slight depth of field effect). The rendering times were awfull!
So I had to change the stepping width and the reduce the number of rays per
pixel. This led to the noise in the front of the scene (the hand is far
away from the rest). 
By the way: the hand model I used is downloaded from the avalon server!
Thank you very much! 
To make it short, the picture could have been in a much higher qualitiy,
but I had not enough time to do it. Nevertheless it's the first time I
entered the competition, and I am very proud that I've created the picture
with my self written ray tracer.
If you too are programming a raytracer, I would be nice to talk about ideas.
Or if you have some other coments, hints, tips or critic, just mail me....