EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net NAME: Robert Lee TOPIC: Great Inventions COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Plastic COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV 3.5 TOOLS USED: IFranView, Little Gray Cells RENDER TIME: about 4 hrs 34 min HARDWARE USED: 2.4 GHz Pentium on Windows 2000 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In 1912 a German chemist, Fritz Klatte, let a mixture of hydrogen chloride and mercury sit in the sun. A milky sludge formed and then solidified. The material was patented, but discarded as not very useful. The material Klatt threw away was vinyl chloride. In the 1930's a varient of the substance, polyvinyl chloride was developed. This new substance, PVC, was the forerunner of plastic, without which the modern industrialized nations could not function. Historical material taken from "Connections" by James Burke. I submit that not only is plastic a key ingredient of many great inventions; but, plastic itself is a great invention. Once plastic's basic properties were discovered, our lives accelerated. Now we have to keep up with change every day as new products are developed. Our world changes at an ever- increasing rate as plastic is bent, shaped, and molded into a variety of forms. Plastic allows common, everyday items to be reinvented every day. If you looked around, you could identify at least ten things within your view that are made of plastic. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All the shapes are fairly standard. The glass pipes are sphere sweeps. The jars and flasks are lathe objects. The paper pad is made up of two bicubic patches that are warped at one corner. The frost and condensation around the large gray cylinder is made up of an invisible cylinder and lathe object that holds media. The landscape outside the window is a height field I had used from a previous entry. I really wanted a tree in that window, but could not get it to work. Oh well. There is a shadowless light outside to shine on the clouds and an area light to shine in the window. I had a problem when adding the area light outside and had to solve the problem by using a light group to include the gas hose and tank, coffee cup, chemical pipes, and right hand wall. There is a key area light to the right to cast a few shadows, and there is a fill light, shadowless, just above the camera. Radiosity: I used the follwoing radiocity settings: pretrace_start 0.08 pretrace_end 0.008 count 50 error_bound 0.5 recursion_limit 4 nearest_count 1 gray_threshold 0 brightness 1.5 media on normal on always_sample off save_file "PlasticsRad1" IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.