EMAIL: bsholmes@utah-inter.net NAME: Blaine Holmes TOPIC: Physics & Math COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Black Hole Drain COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None (yet) RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01 for Windows TOOLS USED: Editor, Corel Photo Paint 6 to manipulate the GIF image map used in sky sphere and for JPG conversion RENDER TIME: approximately 1 day, 9 hours HARDWARE USED: Cyrix 6x86 166+ (133 Mhz) w/ 32 MB Memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Interpretation of a graphical representation of a gravity well created by a black hole, intentionally made to look like a tile drain with a plug (manufactured by PLUGCO, "We got a stopper for anything") in it and filled with water. A little play on the whole space/time thing. Throw in a few Einstein and Theory of Relativity items and we are ready to go! The zip contains all the different fonts I used and the sky Einstein cloud GIF. Pop these in your include file and your ready to render. I have intended to submit to an earlier themes (flight and glass) and just haven't had the time to complete an image enough for a suitable submission, so here is my first submission. I am a perfectionist and still tweaking this one like crazy and have just run out of time. When I first saw the Physics and Math theme I couldn't come up with anything witty, until in June, I was in the shower, early in the morning, still foggy headed, and "DING!", it hit me. I hope you enjoy! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The tile gravity well is a stretched torus and a disc with layered textures. A color map and slope map have been specified for each texture to get the tile look. The reflection on the tile is of the clouds above and the black part near the water is the reflection of the of the water which is a reflection of the tile on the other side. I attempted to use layered normal maps for the tile look and had to forget it because it looked terrible. The water is a union of a box with a blob of spheres on top. Using any flat object with normal modifiers looked good, except at the waters edge it made a perfect eclipse no matter how bumpy the water was. This way the waters edge is not precise (took a bit longer to trace as well!). The drain is a sphere, two torii, raised text and a difference of cylinders and spheres for where the ring attaches. The metal ring is torus pieces offset. The floating letters are text objects, obviously. The Einstein phrase is produced with a hollow box, placed out of the picture with the text cut from one side and an intense yellow light inside to give us the projector effect. I was going to just use spotlights with text in the way to produce shadows, but I like the way this turned out! Also out of the scene is a large sphere surrounding the whole image for a cloudy sky. It consists of two pigment maps, the lower is a image map with some pictures of Einstein placed on it to look like clouds. I was hoping to see these images in reflections off the tile and water, and if you look closely you may see vague images but this one didn't come to full fruition. I pulled the Einstein pictures and the quote off the net and didn't track where I got them from. Sorry! So, thanks to whomever is so dedicated to Einstein and his work to provide the site. Thanks!