EMAIL: warwick@cs.uq.edu.au NAME: Warwick Allison TOPIC: Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Virtual Bitter - Because BEER wants to be free. COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: http://www.uq.edu.au/~cswallis RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 TOOLS USED: Gimp, mtekscan, Linux, xfig RENDER TIME: 1 week (approx.) HARDWARE USED: 90MHz Pentium, Scanner IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A delicious stubby bottle of Virtual Bitter beer pours to fill a tall Pilsner glass. Bubbles rise throughout the beer to a frothy white head. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The bottle is CSG, but the Pilsner beer glass was made using a Lathe - MUCH easier and better results. I modelled the lathe curve using xfig, but it doesn't use the same mathematical model so I had to hand-tweak it a bit. The bubbles in the beer are the biggest contributor to the tracing time - but beer as GOT to have bubbles. There are 1884 of them (most are not visible) semi-randomly positioned in 220 streams of bubbles. In retrospect, I should have placed the bubble streams manually to reduce the rendering time, but once the final render was started, I wasn't going to stop! I used manual bounding of the bubbles - it more than halved tracing time. The bar mat has a granite normal pattern. The windows in the background are just there to provide scenery for refracting through the glass - real ones are on the wall right next to my computer (I modelled this room with povray before building it). The beer label is a "Victoria Bitter" label, modified using The Gimp. The file "vb.gif" is not included in the zip file, as it is 746K, besides, you'd want to have your own brand of beer.