EMAIL:Povmax@aol.com NAME:MaryAnn Mandell TOPIC:Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE:Inorganic Carbon COUNTRY:USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED:POV 3.0 TOOLS USED:Moray, Orb-Cyl, Helixir and PSP5 for the heightfield and jpg conversion. RENDER TIME:about 38 hrs I used adaptive supersampling with aa .3 to get rid of the jagged edges. HARDWARE USED:Pentium II IMAGE DESCRIPTION: For some reason the first thing that jumped into my mind when I saw the topic was diamonds. After thinking about it meant inorganic carbon. I did some research on the web and found that on earth, inorganic carbon is found as lamp black or soot, charcoal and burned organic matter, diamonds, graphite and fullerene. Diamonds have been found in meteorites and carbon has been found in space. Fullerene was only recently discovered; first mathematically in the late 1980s and then visually on the electron microscope in the early 1990s. Because its structure is similar to the geodesic domes designed by Buckmeister Fuller, it was named fullerene after him and the structure is called a buckyball. It does appear naturally. Once I had decided to do a scene using inorganic carbon, I knew that it would have to a surrealist image because I could not see any other way of combining such disparate objects. I choose to show lamp black or soot created by a hurricane lamp, graphite using a mechanical pencil and a lead holder, a diamond necklace and lumps of charcoal. Because fullerene is so rare and is not visible to the naked eye, I had to use one of its crystalline structures to depict it. In order to show all of this, I decided that relative scale of the various objects had to be irrelevant and that it could not be considered it their placement. My vision was to place these objects in a stark environment, devoid organic elements except those needed to depict the objects themselves. I also wanted very harsh lighting. In order to show that most of these forms were created by geologic forces I wanted an ash volcano churning away. Artistically, I used the small pieces of charcoal and the crystalline structures of graphite and diamonds to create movement around the scene. I want to thank the POV folks, esp. Mike Hough, on AOL for their help and encouragement. Note: according to my research, graphite has a hexagonal crystalline structure. Diamonds are in the isometric system and have been found in many of its subtypes as well as cubic; I choose to use the cubic structure. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used Moray to create the objects. Except for the brass and chrome textures, the rest of the textures are origional and were made using Moray's texture. The lumps of coal were created using Orb-Cyl. There were differenced with cubes to eliminate some of the triangles and to give them a more irregular outline. POV gave warnings about it but did it anyway. They have a unique texture using a color map and a normal. The mountains are a heightfield that have been textured with a texture map so that it looks like ash from the volcano has fallen on it and yet blends with the ground. The volcano is a halo in an enormous flattened sphere so that it appears to infuse the clouds and sky with ash. I choose to use a mechanical pencil to illustrate graphite because I thought it would be more fun to make than a wooden one. The spring inside was created using Helixir and textured with a chrome texture. The pencil is a transparent blue with a spiral normal that has six arms echoing the hexagonal crystal structure of graphite. The other parts of the pencil are done using csg. The mechanical pencil looks just like the one I went out and bought just to make sure I got it right. So does the container for extra leads. It is make using csg with color maps to give the texture. The little 2 is also make from differencing a torus, a cube and cylinders with two other cylinders so it would curve around the tube that holds the lead. To make the buckyballs or fullerene, I found a web site in Japan and used the information there and a lot of trial and error to get the angles right to create a buckyball out of spheres and cylinders. I also used spheres and cylinders to make the other crystal structures. The diamonds were made using a superquartic "double pillow", which was scaled to be very thin, for each of the 57 facets. I used the information for making a brilliant cut diamond I found on the web for placing the facets. Then with a little differencing and merging and an ior of 2.47 I got a nice diamond that actually had a little fire and flash to it. However, when I used aa to get rid of the jagged edges in the rest of the scene, most of the fire was lost. What I ended up having to do was add some iridescence to the texture. As a matter of fact I had to use three different amounts and thicknesses depending on the size and position of the diamonds. I even played around with the iridescent wave lengths but settled on the default. I got out one of the many hurricane lamps we keep here in S. Florida so I could observe it burn inorder to create one for this scene. The base was made from a rotational sweep and the other metal parts from tori, cylinders, spheres and cones. All have a brass metal texture. The chimney consists of an outer rotational sweep that has a texture map that makes it look very sooty in the proportions that my real lamp chimney got sooty. I had to use two containers for the halos because the smoke halos did something to the fire halos to make them turn black. The fire halos are in a sphere. When I used a second sphere for the smoke halos the fire was ok but it ruined the soot texture on the chimney. After much aggravation, I copied the rotational sweep of the chimney and scaled it slightly smaller and put the smoke halos in there. It looks great!