TITLE: Anniversary
NAME: Rich Miller
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: richmiller@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/pines/6360/ (New; not ready)         http://www.cybercity.hko.net/newyork/richm          (Old; s-l-o-w)

TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rcm-glas.jpg
ZIPFILE: rcm-glas.zip
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows (95)
TOOLS USED: 
Moray 2.5, Nathan Kopp's LNSFLARE.INC;
            For bitmap creation: CorelDRAW! and Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 27 hours 55 min 45 sec
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 w/ 32 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 2:00 a.m., and the celebration has moved to more secluded territory.

 First came the candlelight dinner, then the gift of an anniversary clock,
 followed by intimate conversation and reminiscing over a bottle of dusky 
 red, under a harvest moon. Emboldened by Merlot, and aflame with the magic
 of the moment, the impassioned couple has retired to pursue marital bliss
 of a more athletic character--neglecting for the moment to extinguish the
 burning candle at the center of the scene. Not to worry, however: as she
 slips into something more comfortable, he will discover the omission and
 remove the fire hazard.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

 All of the object creation was accomplished with one version of Moray or
 another. The window I made a year or two ago, with version 1.x, and the
 basis for the domed anniversary clock was made with the 2.0 beta. Much
 refinement later with Moray 2.5, and we have the following: over 60,000
 frame level objects (all those rotation-sweep smooth triangles!) and 
 roughly 28 hours rendering time.

 This is easily the largest POV file I've ever traced, as I've never
 tried to fit so much into one image before. Almost everything interesting
 is a smoothed rotation sweep modeled in Moray.

 Exceptions: the wax part of the candle, the flame, the card, the rose and
 the ribbon, all of which are fashioned from bezier/bicubic patches; the 
 string of pearls (which are all simply spheres manually positioned--no 
 external utilities used); the moon (the result of a separate moodily-lit 
 trace of data gleaned from the Clementine lunar mission mapped round a 
 shadowed sphere, then imagemapped onto a disc beyond the window). The clock 
 and clock dome are all CSG (proud of that dome), except for the clock hands, 
 which are height fields of images created in CorelDRAW! and exported through 
 Paint Shop Pro to .GIFs. The clock face was created in CorelDRAW! and moved 
 through PSP to a .TGA. The wine bottle label is wrapped around a cylinder 
 hovering scant smidgens above the bottle surface, and was created with PSP. 
 PSP was also used for the card's lettering and border.

 The lighting and mood of the scene took the longest to perfect; the candle's
 light is a slightly yellowish gray with a fairly short falloff value, and
 the moon just has one source at its center, a dim yellow-orange for the
 harvest moon. Placing everything so the moonlight backlighting everything
 didn't subtract from the candlelight and its great shadows & highlights was
 the trickiest. The lens flare (thank you Mr. Kopp!) I thought made spectac-
 ular a somewhat lackluster (bezier) flame, so I customized and kept it.

 How I'd improve the scene: more time spent on the card and wine label, area
 lights for the moon and candle, and depth of field (focal blur). Even so,
 I'm very happy with this image. I feel the composition worked out well, if
 a bit cluttered. I just couldn't bring myself to work halos into the picture;
 I could easily have added clouds in front of the moon, or a halo flame for
 the candle, but a) they take way too long to trace, and b) Moray doesn't
 support them yet, so re-placing them for every render would have been a pain. 
I was *just* patient enough to cut-n-paste the lens flare every time; :)

 This has been lots of fun, people; let's keep these good themes coming! :)