EMAIL: ejvermeulen@wxs.nl
NAME: Erick Vermeulen
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Democritus and buckminsterfullerene
COUNTRY: Netherlands
WEBPAGE: none (yet)
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.