EMAIL: bergerj@iname.com
NAME: Jerome BERGER
TOPIC: Imaginary worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Through the looking glass
COUNTRY: France
WEBPAGE: http://www.enst.fr/~jberger
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for windows v 3.1
TOOLS USED: Arabeske, Paint Shop Pro, paper and pencil
RENDER TIME: parse: 1s, render  1h 56m 48s
HARDWARE USED: P-II 333MHz, 64Mo RAM, Windows 98
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  We're on the "wrong" side of the mirror, looking out at the real world much as 
Alice must have done...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  Here's a good application of the matrix transformation: most of the room is 
kept in a single #declare which is then instanciated twice. The candles were 
added afterwards, and one of the rooms got a matrix transformation that 
mirrored it on the other side of the wall. I then fiddled with clipped_by 
statements to prevent the two rooms from interfering with one another 
(especially in the fireplaces).

A few random notes:
  - I had a harware problem that didn't leave me as much time as I'd have liked 
to make this scene. It is therefore incomplete (I would have liked to add 
something on the walls, and a few objects only seen as reflections in the brass 
items wouldn't have been amiss for example).
  - the back and floor of the fireplace are actual bricks since I didn't manage 
to get quite the effect I wanted with a brick pattern. BTW the docs say that you 
should NEVER use the bounded_by statement for a union since POV does it very 
well automatically ("never" is emphasised in th help), but I' found out that 
manually bounding these brick walls actually cut the rendering time by something 
like half an hour... Some improvement was also achieved by careful bounding of 
the tables.
  - everything was hand-coded directly in POV's internal editor, mostly as CSGs.
  - the logs are blobs generated randomly by a home made macro.
  - if anything, I'm rather proud of the candle flame, too bad it's not more 
visible...