EMAIL: stubbs@dundee.net
NAME: S.T. McWhinnie
TOPIC: elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Heavy Water
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http:\\www.dundee.net\stubbs
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.0, sPatch for figures and hoses, hand coding for lights and Povray 3.1 specific commands 
RENDER TIME: 3h 0m 02s
HARDWARE USED: AMD K-6 200 32 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
When I learned what the topic for this contest round was, I immediately thought what sort of aspects of water can I do something with- liquid, ice, rain, steam, refraction clarity etc.  Then I thought about the heavy water used in reactors- what was that stuff- is it still used?, and what is it like?  After a little bit of research I ran across photographs with that eerie blue glow.  Aha I thought, what a cool creepy color, and it will be a real challenge to model with the new media commands with POV 3.1.  I tried to work in some complementary color action (the muted orange, yellow and red) to counteract the strong blue and provide enough interesting detail in the reactor room.  I did not want to use any image maps for the textures, so everything is using the procedural shaders.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I started this image soon after POV 3.1 came out.  I thought that I was not going to be able do a really good water, and I had already been messing with refraction for a different contest, and was not really inspired to jump into it again for this one. However, I really wanted to get into the scene description language and learn its ins and outs, and I wanted to learn the POV textures without using texture maps.  So I thought I'd using the new media commands and find out how to structure the commands as I went along.  This proved to be a good method for learning POV, however the interior media output is not obvious.  I tried the emitting, adsorption and scattering with a whole bunch of parameters, and could not get the glowing blue look of the reactor core I wanted.  I ended up using animations with the parameters tied to the clock e.g. scattering {4, clock*.25} to find just the right color/glow that I was looking for.  Though the bulk of the image is made of CSG objects; I used sPatch for the human figures and hoses.