EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
NAME: Peter Murray
TOPIC: Physics & Math
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Newton, physicist and mathematician
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
COUNTRY: England
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 Macintosh 68K
TOOLS USED: DeskDraw (2D working drawings)
RENDER TIME: 1 hours 25 minutes  24.0 seconds (5124 seconds)
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh Centris 650
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A future museum with token objects representing aspects of Newton's career.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
A biography of Isaac Newton on the History channel came along at the right time;
the discoverer of gravity, the inventor of calculus, the discoverer of the laws
of motion, the discoverer that white light is composed of separate colours; a
perfect subject.  I'd already had a mental image of a circular room, and I built
that from Bezier patches (sketched out in a 2D program) to use as a futuristic
museum setting.
The so-called Newton's cradle represents the laws of motion.  It was fun
to make, and pleasantly straightforward to do.
The Earth-Moon system, illustrating gravity, took a bit longer.  I know there
are image maps around which could have been used, but I'm in an anti-imagemap
phase :-) .  The "Earth" looked better at the smaller resolutions than it does
at this size.  Maybe it's the planet the museum's on :-) .
The prism represents the colours that make up white light.  I know POV can't
split light, but I spent a while fiddling trying to fake it without needing
to edit together three or more renderings.  As you can see, I didn't manage
it.
I gave up on trying to get a recognisable face object by the deadline, and used an
imagemap, despite hoping to avoid doing that.  (The picture came from a website
whose URL I've mislaid - oops... I found it via AltaVista.)  Umm, my excuse
there is that a portrait from the 17th century must now be out of copyright.