EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
NAME: Bob Franke
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Modern Alchemy
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 beta 4
TOOLS USED: POV, Poser2 and PhotoStyler for jpeg conversion
RENDER TIME: 28 hours 18 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350, 96 Mb & Windows NT

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Alchemy is an occult art and pseudoscience based on the
belief that there are four basic elements--fire, air,
earth and water--and three essentials: salt, sulfur and
mercury. Its practitioners' main goals have been:

(1) to turn base metals into precious metals (like gold or
    silver) (the transmutation motif);

(2) to create a potion or metal which could cure all ills
    {the medical motif), and

(3) discover an elixir which would lead to immortality
    (the transcendence motif).

In the Middle Ages alchemy became big business.  Charlatans,
calling themselves alchemists, received large grants from
the very rich with the promise of being able to turn lead or
mercury into gold.  The trick was to milk this scheme as
long a possible and then get out of town before the hoax is
discovered.  These individuals have been known to be hung
from golden gallows.

Today, small quantities of mercury have been converted to
gold with the use of a particle accelerator.  In my image
there is a modern day alchemists taking advantage of the
quiet night shift for the unauthorized conversion of mercury
onto gold.  The only problem is that he is using a research
cyclotron and the gold is being created at the cost of one
million tax payer dollars per gram.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is a fictitious cyclotron, constructed almost exclusively
with solid construction geometry.  The man on top the ladder,
peering into the collision chamber, was done with Poser 2.
The cyclotron is surrounded with an array of  anti-matter
power supplies.  The highly dangerous central portions are
shielded with blue containment barriers, created with the new
media function.

POV was used to create the bitmap for the sheet metal on the
power supply coils.  The random function was used to determine
the color of the individual sheets.

The scene is illuminated with 30 3x3 area lights, one dim
shadowless light, a couple of lights inside the cyclotron and
a bright light inside the collision chamber.  Without the area
lights, the image only takes two hours to trace.  Because the
rectangle for the area lights is small, the shadows came out
more sharply defined than I expected.

To save space, the bitmaps for the computer screens and the
sheet metal and the Poser object were not included.