EMAIL: luisvaloyes@malditasea.zzn.com
NAME: Luis Valoyes
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Alchemist's room
COUNTRY: Colombia
WEBPAGE: http://www.luisvaloyes.uni.cc
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows
TOOLS USED: -Calimax Modeller
                       -hamaPatch
                       -POV-Ray
                       -EditPad
                       -Pbrush
                       -IrfanView
                       -Jans Formati 8
RENDER TIME: 41 min 29 sec ( 13' 17" for parsing and 28' 12" for tracing )
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6, 32 Mb RAM, running Windows 98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
An alchemist's bedroom and laboratory, with some basic tools that one of those ancient scientists may have used to try to obtain gold from lead. It is night time, and only a candle gives some light to the room.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
1. MODELING: The bedroom, the green bottle and a pottery vase were made with Calimax Modeller, everything else was modeled with hamaPatch, which I have found very useful to get some free and organic shapes. I mostly used predefined shapes and some lathe objects, and modified them to get the shapes that I needed. The table is made with several independent boxes to make it look less perfect, more like a work table.
2. TEXTURES: All the image-maps and bump-maps used for the scene were created using Pbrush, modified and converted into GIF format with IrfanView. I also used several procedural textures, including the one for the smoke and the one for the flame. I know I did not get neither a realistic smoke cloud nor a realistic flame, but it's the first time I try to make that kind of stuff, and I think it did not result too bad.
3. SCENE: It took a couple of days to put together all the objects for the final scene. I used two light sources, one from inside the flame and one from the top of the flame, because I needed the scene to be dark but I wanted that some objects could be seen well. Fortunately the rendering time was not too long.
4. IMAGE: The final image was rendered with POV-Ray as an 800x600 bitmap, I made three versions of the final scene, with different camera angles, and finally selected this one. I used Pbrush to add the caption and Jans Formati to make the JPG file.

Notes: 
1. Thank you for all the comments about my two entries for the previous round, they have been very useful.
2. If you find this scene too dark, please check your monitor's contrast. I tried to make some gamma correction but that added some undesired details to the scene.
3. In the ZIP file I included the .pov and .inc files, all the texture maps and also the hamaPatch and Calimax Modeller files. The hamaPatch files require at least version 2.08.