TITLE: The Bessemer Process
NAME: Jesse Johnson
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jejo@empireone.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.empireon.net/~jejo/
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bessemer.jpg
ZIPFILE: bessemer.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV Ray 3.0 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe PhotoShop for the two image maps and for converting the
    image to .JPG

RENDER TIME: 


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 90 w/ 24megs of ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This is the first stage in the Basic Oxygen Process, a
    variation of the Bessemer Process, in which molten iron is poured into
    the oxygen furnace.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    This picture was inspired by a
picture in one of my elementary school history books that showed a bunch
of 19th century factory workers shoving a giant rod of metal into a furnace.
Sparks flying, molten iron dripping, limbs being torn off, I thought to
myself "now, there's something that would be fun to raytrace!"  Well, 
actually at the time I didn't think that, but when I saw the topic of this
month's contest, I remembered the picture and thought it would be a fun thing
to try to replicate.  I couldn't find the picture, so instead I settled for
the pictures and illustrations in the 10th volume of the 1990 World Book
Encyclopedia.
    So, anyways, the image was designed entirely by hand, except, of course,
for the two image maps (the calendar and the safety warning sign) which were
made in PhotoShop.  The models are all pretty simple, but there are a few
tricks that might be of interest.
    I set the default ambient level to 0 so that it would be really dark
except in the places I wanted it not to be.  Most of the light is coming from
the iron, but there are two dim lights above and below the ladel (the big
thing hanging from the ceiling) to create what appears to be ambient light
around its outline.  All the lights have fade parameters so that the light
is concentrated around that one corner of the image.  There are three
spotlights against the far left wall that appear between the rails on the
left.  This was an attempt to show how big the factory was, but I don't know
how well it worked.
    The molten iron was created with a fairly common trick used for light
bulbs, etc.  It's made from a section of a torus that's been scaled to look
like it's pouring out of the ladel.  The ambient value is set to 1 and the
no_shadow flag is included.  There are three lights in and around it, two
red and one yellow.  I didn't calculate exactly which points are in the torus 
because they don't have to be in it, just near it, for the effect to work.
    The stains on the walls are simply a .04 units thick box placed right in 
front of the wall (.01 units away from it) that uses a pigment map with the
bumps gradient to vary the pigment from rgbt<0,0,0,1> to rgbt<0,0,0,.8>.  The
walls themselves simply use the brick map for the pigment and bumps for the
normal (scale down a lot).
        The rest of the objects are pretty simple and straight-forward.  The
image is more a study of light than an exhibition of incredibly detailed
model work.  I hope you like it.