EMAIL: rbolin@hill-top.com
NAME: Draugnar
TOPIC: Math & Physics
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Physics at Play
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: (under construction)
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01 for Windows 95, Pentium Optimized
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro for JPG conversion.
RENDER TIME: 2 hours 54 minutes 27 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Gateway P5-166 w/ 32 Meg RAM, 1.2 Gig master, 600 Meg slave.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A study of a desk "toy" for relieving stress and the physics equations
that govern its operation.  The equations were taken from the CRC 
Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 64th edition, 1983-1984.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The base is a simple CSG with a block and some cylinder cut-outs on 
the edges.  Cylindrical holes were cut out for realism purposes to 
accommodate the hangers.

The hangers are really one hanger placed within a #while loop and 
consists of 5 cylinders and 4 spheres with two cutouts for the 
fishing line that suspends the penduli.

The line itself is 5 cylinders and 4 spheres and it's texture is a 
hazy "glass" with little reflectivity, sort of like fishing line.

The penduli are spheres with small cylindrical holes cut out of there 
center for the fishing line.  Note the detail.  The holes are larger 
than the line, so the line is off center of the penduli.

I used my favorite sky sphere and used a sphere for the ground instead
of a plane.

The definitions/equations are built using three different fonts;
a standard text font, a mathematics symbol font (for the square root),
and a greek font for the lowercase Pi.  The texture is a ruby glass 
found in the standard POVRAY includes.  Why re-invent the wheel?  I
chose this particular texture because my first renders with shiny 
black and dull black lost depth perception and the phong made part of
the equations unreadable.  By adjusting the light source a little to
eliminate the phong, and switching to a slightly opaque glass texture,
you can see the shadows within the lettering and enough light gets
through to keep the shadows casted on the toy by the letters more
muted.

My signature was actually rendered as part of the scene this time and
casts both a shadow and a reflection on the ground sphere.  I think 
I'll start doing this with all of my images for now on.  This is 
actually a TTF font and is a text object, not a heightfield.  I find
the smoothness of a TTF font and a text object so markedly better
that I only use heightfields when no font exists (like last round's
Ingersol logo on my clock).

I have included the source code, but not the actual copyrighted fonts
it uses.  That would be a violation of the copyright and, as a
programmer, I fully support copyright law and refuse to be party
to copyright violations.  You may use any part of this code EXCEPT
the "signature" in your own images.  The signature is my way of 
identifying my original pieces of work.  Please do not use this
on one of your own.

Thank you,

Draugnar