TITLE: DBW Tribute
NAME: Joel NewKirk
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: newkirk@snip.net
WEBPAGE: http://users.snip.net/~newkirk
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dbwtribu.jpg
ZIPFILE: dbwtribu.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray V3.1 Amiga and Windows

RENDER TIME: 
    approx 6 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Amiga 2000 (initial comception) custom AMD K6-2 350MHz to render

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This image is a tribute to the first Ray-Traced picture I ever saw.  The image
was called 'Glass', and was created by David Wecker using his raytracer
DBWRender, available (ca 1986) for Amiga and Vax.  This was my 'First
Encounter' with raytracing, and I've been hooked ever since.  

That original image was of a room constructed from brick-textured walls, and
populated with two light-sources and (I believe) 6 glass spheres.  This tribute
image is deliberately simplistic component-wise because of the nature of the
encounter it relates to.  The only major departure from the 'original' image is
the bowtile floor.  (I always thought a brick floor looked strange)

I suspect that for many of us, our 'first encounter' with ray-tracing was a
'glass ball and checkerboard' style of image.  Dave Wecker's 'glass.img' was my
first encounter, and in fact the first scene I ever raytraced.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The scene was originally created on my Amiga 2000 (accellerated) but would have
taken prohibitively long to render there at the 0.01 AA method 2 setting, and
to complicate matters my A2000's hard drive was wiped two weeks ago. The final
scene adjustments and final render were completed on my newly-constructed
custom AMD K6-2 350MHz system, which I built two weeks ago.  (proper break-in,
huh? ;^)

The floor was created with an include I wrote during the early POV-Ray 3.1
development stages, to test out the macro features.  That include is being
greatly expanded to include many different tiling patterns now.

The walls were done as follows:
walls not directly visible were simply a brick pattern pigment.
Walls directly visible were done with a brick pattern texture_map, with
transparent grout and a custom slope_map crackle pattern for the normal, to
simulate cracks and pits in the bricks.  (visible clearly through the left
sphere, near the wall)  The actual wall objects are a pair of nested box
objects, with the inner one (only slightly smaller) being the grout, to show
through the transparent grout in the outer patterned object and make a visible
protrusion of the bricks beyond the grout.

As with the original 'glass.img', there are two light sources. (not visible,
where in the original, light-sources were visible as white circles)  Extra
'lights' visible in the spheres are products of internal and surface
reflections.

j

Joel Newkirk
Maple Shade NJ
December 21, 1998