TITLE: Science project
NAME: Robert Fremin
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: d96rfr@csd.uu.se
WEBPAGE: http://fly.to/robertf/
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: project.jpg
ZIPFILE: project.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.1.beta.5.watcom.win32 Pentium II optimized

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro, CorelDraw 7

RENDER TIME: 
    83s parse, 18h 38m render @800x600 recursive AA level .3

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200MHz, 128MB EDO


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Some students have been assigned a project that consist of gathering some
physical maifestation of each of the four classical elements Fire, Water,
Air and Earth.
As they think all of the objects they have are correct, they went to get
the teacher to approve.
The scene is from the lab-room, where they collect items from around.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I was busy with my new homepage most of July and August, and had just two
weeks left to do this image. With no particular idea I bagan to make some
objects, hoping they would inspire me. After some days I got better and better
visions of the set, and the objects came out quite well too. Most of the
objects were done without anything too look at, and I had to guess details
from memory (since I had physics a long time ago).
I hope the desk don't look too cramped with stuff.

Assumed gamma 1.0 and display gamma 1.4.

Objects:
--------
All multiple objects are CSG's ofcourse, and all objects are macros (some
of them taking arguments and some not at all).

* desk:
  Superellipsoids, boxes and sor's, nothing special. I used superellipsoids
  instead of boxes because I wanted highligts on the edges, as Martin
  Magnusson pointed out.

* shelves:
  Again superellipsoids as shelves. The frame is cylinders and torus-halves.

* books:
  Nice little macros! Boxes, cylinders and text, all easily changed as
  parameters in a macro (width, height, color, text).

* glass:
  Superellipsoid minus a cylinder plus a torus. The new interior gave me some
  headache at first, but wasn't too hard to use.

* pot-o-plant:
  Sonya Roberts' tree include file, but modified to comply with POV 3.1 syntax.
  The pot is made from cones and the soil is a cone and some spheres spread
  around. I made the flowers larger than default as I had some problems to
  get the tree look like a plant. The scaling of the stem vs. the branches
  always made the plant look thick and chubby. It finally solved itself
  and I made a larger flower to compensate the scale.

* periodic table:
  Boxes with imagemap (found on the net).

* oxygen tube:
  Cylinders, spheres and superellipsoids. Dents and a label projected onto a
  cylinder adds to the realism. I had to guess how the valve was constructed.
  The label was made by me in coreldraw. (Read it!)

* water bottle:
  Cylinders, toruses and cones together with superellipsoids makes up this
  lab plastic bottle. The water is a cylinder and the marking is a transparent
  png-image (by me) on a cylinder. Heavy use of interior with refraction and
  caustics.

* notepad:
  Just some superel. and boxes with an imagemap.

* post-it:
  Box with imagemap drawn by me.

* pencils:
  Cylinders and cones.

* eraser:
  A white superellisoid.

* molecules:
  I made some macros and put them together ion by ion (like).

* candles:
  My first object in the scene. Nice highquality details that enables closeups.
  The flame took the longest time to do, and is a sphere with emitting
  interior and arealighting. The macro will allow the candle to be lit/unlit
  and some other settings.

* matchbox:
  Boxes mostly. Imagemap is a crazy version of the most famous swedish brand
  of matches - Solstickan.

* towers of hanoi:
  Superellipsoids and cylinders. This is a game that computer scientists
  have to learn algebra from...

* model:
  Seen it before?? :) I used this from my socorro (IRTC Feb 1998) image.
  It needed some semicolons and such but wasn't too hard to use again.

I used 25 lightsources (arealight) and a pointlight as fill-light. The
candle flame is an arealight with 4 lightsources.

Peak memory usage was 60MB.

I have definitly learnt to make the objects more independent this time, and
in the future i might use some of them again (with much more ease than today).

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