EMAIL: michaelg@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu
NAME: Michael Guslick
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3 for Linux
TOOLS USED: Graph paper, pencil and a few curse words
RENDER TIME: 46 hours 25 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD 386DX-40

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"It is the weapon of a Jedi Knight..."  This is my own lightsaber design,
created for a Star Wars roleplaying game that I'm in.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The whole thing started out as doodling during one of my more boring classes.
I actually drew most of it up on Cadkey and FastSolid (an ACIS-based solid
modeler for Cadkey) to see if I really liked the design.  I tried rendering
it in Trispectives, but I wasn't very impressed with the output (besides, I
hate using Windoze...).  So I thought I'd give Povray a try (yes, this is my
very first work with Povray!).  Trispectives does allow you to output a file
in Povray 2.x format, so I gave that a try.  Well, Povray 3 did not like the
file at all.  It gave me a lot of warnings while parsing and finally gave up
at the end.  I took a look at the file (about 1.5 megs!) and saw that it was
chock full of these "smooth_triangle" thingies....  Hmm...  Looks like I need
to learn how to use POVRAY and just rebuild the whole thing....

I started by taking the CAD drawings that I had made and made a ton of grid
lines over the various views of the model.  I then started typing everything
in, starting with the easy stuff (the cylinders used to make up the rear).
Everything on the lightsaber was created using CSG, as I can't comprehend
doing a model any other way...

I threw a halo in for the blade very early on, and I was impressed with how
good it looked.  After a point, I had gotten comfortable enough with POVRAY to
improvise various features that I hadn't originally thought of (like the
dimples on the two copper colored rings on the focusing head).  I added a few
little LEDs to the activation button housing as well, but I'm not real pleased
with how they turned out - note the little fringes of red at the tips of one of
the green LED triangles - I'm not sure why they appeared there (any ideas?).  I
played with a lot of different metal textures (practically every one that came
in the .inc files) and finally settled on a few different chromes, a copper and
a bronze.  I used just a little bumpiness on two of the chrome areas of the
main body to give a break from the straight metal finishes on the other parts.
I had originally planned on doing a very worn finish (like a plated metal
flaking off of a slightly different base metal), but I haven't figured out how
to do that yet...  I also wanted to make the brown handgrip look like leather
or finely textured vinyl, but I settled on using a wood texture - at the camera
distance, you can't tell that it's wood anyhow.

Then I needed a floor.  I wanted to do something that looked like the shiny
black floors of the Death Star, so I made a bunch of big flat superellipsoids
and a simple plane for the grout.  I gave the tiles a very gentle bump setting
to distort the reflection slightly and used the F_Metal_C finish to give the
tiles a nice shiny look.  Throwing in a few scuffs & scrapes on the floor
might make it a little more realistic, but I'm also not quite sure as to how
I'd do that....

For lighting, I simply used two point lights.  I thought it looked pretty good,
even though I had originally planned much more complex lighting.  Unfortunately,
my 386 isn't quite up to the task (extra lighting seems to be more of a drag
than antialiasing).

So there you have it - my first decent Povray rendering.  Not exactly great,
but I'm still working on it....

May the Force be with you,

- Michael

P.S. - Has anyone out there come up with a utility to export .SAT files to .POV
files?  Trispectives' .POV abilities are broken at best...