TITLE: A great (re)invention ! NAME: Thibaut Jonckheere COUNTRY: France EMAIL: tuabihtucl@yahoo.fr WEBPAGE: - TOPIC: Great Inventions COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: kitcomp.jpg ZIPFILE: kitcomp.zip RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.5 TOOLS USED: - ImageMagick to convert the image to jpeg, TheGimp to sign it. - The chairs in the background are from the povray object collection (http://objects.povworld.org/), and are Copyright S.Crofts RENDER TIME: approx. 3 hours 45 minutes HARDWARE USED: Celeron 2GHz, 512 Mo IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The picture shows a great (re)invention that anyone can do in his/her kitchen (as in the picture) - or elsewhere: the compass. Just take a needle, magnetize the tip, put it through a piece of cork floating on water, and - it's magic! - the needle will always orient itself in the same direction (the North-South line), pushed by an "invisible force"! I think that the (true) invention of the compass is a great achievement: to make the connection between forces acting on some bizare materials found in nature, and the global geography of earth is quite subtle. And it has been since its invention extremely usefull (navigation ,etc.). So, to re-discover the compass with such a simple experiment is a very pleasant thing to do. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I am new to PovRay and raytracing in general (this is my first IRTC entry), so I guess there is nothing specially involved in this picture. The plate is a lathe object (in fact,the profile is just a tanh(x) curve), and the colors are inspired by some plates I have at home. The writing on the notebook is from a image map. The rest is just standard CSG (the chairs are Copyright S.Crofts, from the povray object collection). The light is coming mainly from a window at the right of the picture, with a nice warm sun (but there is also a light bulb on the ceiling... have you noticed how often we keep light bulbs on when they are not really needed ?:-) . The long render-time of the picture (with respect to its simplicity) is mainly due to focal blur. PS: 1) as I am still a beginner with PovRay, all comments and advices are specially welcome. 2) the code given is a bit messy. If anyone is interested, I may clean it a little bit