EMAIL: warwick@cs.uq.edu.au
NAME:  Warwick Allison
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Virtual Bitter - Because BEER wants to be free.
COUNTRY:  Australia
WEBPAGE:  http://www.uq.edu.au/~cswallis
RENDERER USED:  Povray 3.0
TOOLS USED:  Gimp, mtekscan, Linux, xfig
RENDER TIME: 1 week (approx.)
HARDWARE USED: 90MHz Pentium, Scanner
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A delicious stubby bottle of Virtual Bitter beer pours to fill a tall Pilsner
glass.  Bubbles rise throughout the beer to a frothy white head.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The bottle is CSG, but the Pilsner beer glass was made using a Lathe -
MUCH easier and better results.  I modelled the lathe curve using xfig,
but it doesn't use the same mathematical model so I had to hand-tweak
it a bit.

The bubbles in the beer are the biggest contributor to the tracing time
- but beer as GOT to have bubbles.  There are 1884 of them (most are
not visible) semi-randomly positioned in 220 streams of bubbles.  In
retrospect, I should have placed the bubble streams manually to reduce
the rendering time, but once the final render was started, I wasn't going
to stop!  I used manual bounding of the bubbles - it more than halved
tracing time.

The bar mat has a granite normal pattern.

The windows in the background are just there to provide scenery for
refracting through the glass - real ones are on the wall right next
to my computer (I modelled this room with povray before building it).  

The beer label is a "Victoria Bitter" label, modified using The Gimp.

The file "vb.gif" is not included in the zip file, as it is 746K, besides,
you'd want to have your own brand of beer.