TITLE: Democritus and buckminsterfullerene
NAME: Erick Vermeulen
COUNTRY: Netherlands
EMAIL: ejvermeulen@wxs.nl
WEBPAGE: none (yet)
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: evelempl.jpg
ZIPFILE: evelempl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser1, PSP 5.01 for converting tga to jpg, Molpov, 3DWin,

RENDER TIME: 
    parsing 20 seconds, rendering 27 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 233 MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Where classical philosophy and modern chemistry meet. A year ago, I published an
article in a Dutch science magazine, where I am an editor, about large and
small in science. For the lead of the article, that traced the history of
science back to the days of Greek philosophers, I raytraced the four elemental
forms (cube, octagon, icosaeder and tetraeder) with respectively an earth, air,
water, and fire texture. Also, I included some molecules whose form is equal
(also with respect to symmetry axis) to the classical forms, namely cubane
(boxlike), sulphur hexafluoride (octagon), methane (tetraeder) and the most
wonderful 'soccer' molecule buckminsterfullerene or C60, discovered about ten
years ago. The discovers were rewarded with a Nobel Prize. This was a good
starting point for finally making a raytracing for the IRTC (alas, the time, I
discovered this theme of the IRTC competition a week before the deadline). I
studied chemistry, so the theme was very appealing.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


First of all, I wasted a day with a file containing a #while loop. Kept on
wondering why my new computer took so much time for parsing (over twelve
hours). Solution: put in a counter ;-)

The four classic elements are basic shapes included with POVray, to which I
added various textures. In contrast with the images I made for the magazine, I
used the halo feature to obtain sky in the octagon and fire in the tetraeder.
Quite a work. I had many problems with the star background and atmosphere, that
somehow made it impossible to see the halo's. finally I removed the atmosphere
and created a new sky by filling half a shell with tiny spheres, with random
positions and color, to obtain the starlike sky.

I tried to incorporate a landscape, using the continuously improving Leveller
program, (I used version 0.09943) however, the mesh file I obtained had a size
of 180 MB and that seemed to me too much. I could use a targa file, but I find
it nicer to refrain from using height fields in an image. The marble table in
space gives also more Magritte or Dali like atmosphere, I think.

The molecules are very symmetry like and thus the orientation of the various
atoms in them can be more or less calculated. However, there are also files in
pdb format (Brookhaven Protein Data Bank format) circulating with the exact
positions of the atoms. These can be converted to POV with the free program
Molpov 1.1. I heavily edited the files after that, because they are too large
and contain a lot of rubbish remarks. Also, I prefer ball_and-stick models to
space filled models. 

The Dorian columns where originally made by Nathan G.B. O'Brien,
no13@ozemail.com.au, http://www.ozemail.com.au/~no13, who made a perfect
representation of the five classical orders of architecture and mentions in his
13_col.inc file (in which he mentions they are free to use, although
copyrighted by him). To reduce the size of the files, I extracted the
information from his include file that was necessary for the Dorian column,
removed the sturm statement (because I thought that made my computer keep on
parsing) and changed the texture to a marble like texture. 
The granite pointing statue I made with Poser1, a wellcome full version on the
cover disk of PC Format December 1997, and converted to smooth-triangles mesh
with the 3DWIN program by Thomas Baier, after which I gave it a granite
structure.

The result - well, I'm not very satisfied with the cube texture. I had a more
rough version earlier on, but lost the code. It's very solid now, though, with
an iron like robustness. It gave me a lot of fun to spend a few free days
making this image.