TITLE: chado
NAME: Norbert Kern
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: chado.jpg
ZIPFILE: chado.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray v3.5 beta 9 icl.win32

TOOLS USED: 
    Plantstudio, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    ca. 24 h / ca. 490 MB peak memory

HARDWARE USED: 
    1,4 GHz Athlon C / 1 GB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

If I should say a single term which expresses "Spirit of Asia" best, I would
take 
"spirituality". All today's world religions date from Asia for example.
For my entry I chose a visualisation of Chado, the (japanese) way of tea, a Zen

Buddhism concept.
The first tea masters were priests, who had taught their followers 
that enlightenment can only be reached through Zen meditation, 
and the tea ceremony became a means of disciplining the mind. 
In Zen, everything which is not necessary is left out; this is as true of the
mind 
as it is as of the physical setting. The spirit of austere simplicity pervades
the 
tea ceremony. Each utensil has a specific purpose, and only those utensils 
which are necessary for the ceremony are brought into the tea room. 

I recently saw photos of a modern house in Tokyo which lies on a property of 
only 72 sqm. Despite the small base area the house has a modern tea room. 
The image should show some of the near spritual atmosphere of this room. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image is a little study on radiosity and photons. 
All the csg is coded by hand,  the flower is made with Plantstudio.
(http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/).

Most time was needed to get the light right. The ceiling light with its glass
bricks 
is the only source of sun light. After some trial and error I saved the photon
file
 (ca. 100 MB), changed the glass bricks to an opaque box and rendered again.

Next problem was the combination of photons and radiosity, because the render 
speed was very slow even with very simple radiosity settings.

But then a recent posting of Jaimes Vives Piqueres showed the way
(http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/20768/?ttop=21037&toff=50).
I saved mid quality radiosity data from a simplified csg subset (box instead 
of a hardly visible csg tatami, box instead of the tansu, no flower) with simple
textures 
(single colors instead of complex textures, no specularity or reflection, no
normals).
Then the saved radiosity data (ca. 50 MB, render took 79 h) were used in a third

final render.
So a complete render needs three consecutive steps now.

To avoid an ugly moire pattern on the floor,a final render with 2400*1800 pixels
was 
reduced to 800*600 pixels with photoshop. If anyone wants to see more details,
the zip 
file contains a 1200*900 pixel  jpg also.