TITLE: Timeless Alchemy NAME: Marjorie Graterol COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: emediez@emediez.com WEBPAGE: http://www.emediez.com TOPIC: Laboratory COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mg_lab.jpg ZIPFILE: mg_lab.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g TOOLS USED: //Modelers ****sPatch**** Copyright 1996-1998 by Mike Clifton. ****AC3D***** Copyright 1999 by Andy Colebourne ****Corel Draw 8.0 ******* - dingbat/ character manipulation. ****Corel Photopaint 8.0 ******* - compression, signature and digimarc id. //Reference ******Books****** How was it done. The story of Human Ingenuity through the Ages. Feats of Science, section. The Reader's Digest Association, USA, 1998. ****Internet***** http://www.about.com About > Science > Chemistry http://www.crystalinks.com/physmet.html Alchemy and Metaphysics http://planeta.clix.pt/petrinus/ Alchemy http://www.levity.com/alchemy/home.html Alchemy (also .gif image for egyptian symbols for the metal) http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~mulley/Galileo/inventions/inventions5.html Galileo's inventions RENDER TIME: 49m 01s HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium III 500MHz, 96MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Laboratories began as a controlled place to demonstrate theories. This image depicts what I think an early lab looked like. Dated somewhere in the Middle Age, an Alchemy lab, or workshop, was devoted to find the philosophers' stone. A complex procedure to transform ordinary materials into gold, intended to mimic what they believed to be the processes within the earth's crust. However, this goal was only the material aspect of a whole philosophy which involved also mental and spiritual scopes. Alchemists used weird and wonderful laboratory "apparatus". Only few of them are depicted, since there's no way to convey all those symbols in a single scene. Most objects have been created with sPatch, few with AC3D and some with POV-Ray itself. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 1.- Scene 1.1. The building is a CSG object, centered and then rotated. Lobes are just differences. The scene is in a kind of basement or room far from commom people. 1.2. There is a black background behind the building, and objects that are very close to the camera are scaled to fit the scene. 1.3. Simple light_sources were used (three) in a palette setting, no media and no fog. Lights rely on textures to give an ambience, due to the fact that the ambient_light proved to be extremely intrusive. 2.- Objects All objects are referenced in the source file, except these too large files: esc3.inc // wood stairs //5,715 KB mod5.inc //egyptian eye//1,550 KB As possible, from front to rear and left to right. 2.1. Pelican Glass, Galileo's thermoscope, scale, mortar, stones and still in an oven, modeled with sPatch. Exported as POV, whether it be using pig plugin, or bicubic patch. 2.2. Wood stairs and material holder modeled in sPatch, as well as the second pelican glass barely seen behind the stairs. Dee's mirror is a simple sphere in an sPatch object. 2.3. The ornament in the wall (top right) is a composite of two different dingbats characters. They were combined in Corel Draw8, exported as .dxf, extruded and exported as .pov in AC3D. 2.4. Symbols in the paper are, as objects, modeled in sPatch, as well as the holder. As image, it is a .gif image from an alchemy site in the web. 2.5. Containers are surfaces of revolution, scaled and translated differently to fill some spaces. Stones were also modeled in sPatch. The fabric behinf the stairs, sPatch modeled also. 2.6. The small metallic fence is modeled in sPatch. The curtain is an object imported from SoftCad Lite library, textured in POV. 2.7. The table, sandglass -from my "unbelievable" topic entry- and chandelier, are all sPatch objects. 3. Textures 1.1. All textures are procedural, except the image on the wall. Most textures are coded in one of the two include main resources for the pov file. In those files, and maybe in some objects individually, textures that belong to povlab.inc are properly referenced.