EMAIL: rea@st-and.ac.uk NAME: Robert Arthur TOPIC: Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Paperweight. COUNTRY: UK WEBPAGE: http://www-hons-cs.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~rea RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for DOS TOOLS USED: Moray 2.5 (unregistered as yet :( ) and Paint Shop Pro. RENDER TIME: Unsure - long (>24 hours) HARDWARE USED: P60 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A glass paperweight on a burning piece of paper DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image was designed not to be a great task in modelling, but more an excersise in lighting and colour design. As such, it contains very few objects. I call it an `excersise in photorealistic surreality', but I was always a bit like that. The paperweight is simply a y-axis hyperboloid (one of the most useful objects in the universe - should be a primitive...), capped off with planes and some cones. This was given a slightly brown tint, though other than that it is a basic glass texture. The floor was given a bozo pigment with varying greens, and a crackle normal, using a slope_map to get the flat center. Slight reflection was probably unecessary, but by the time the test render came out, it looked OK, and I didn't have time (or electricity) to warrent re-rendering. The Paper is a bezier patch, modelled in Moray, and given an image map for the text. I then applied an onion texture to get the blackened corner, as I was not sure I could persuade the image map to behave near the curl. Again, I may have done this differently given more time to render. The flame is a very simple halo effect. I decided that to make it bigger or more turbulent would probably skew the point of attention too far, so I caught it just before it `flared'. Finally, lighting, and in order to prevent harsh shadows causing a visual distraction, I used an area_light for the spotlight. The only other light source in the scene is the flame, which would have looked odd without casting some light, though I did not want the effect too pronounced, so I gave it a fairly strict fall_off. All lights have a slight yellowish tint, so as to look indoors. I am not sure how the Gamma will look on other machines, since I was in a bit of a hurry to submit. The unlit areas of floor should be `just' visible. I promise to look into this in the future ;) Any further questions, please feel free to e-mail me at the above address. Bob.