TITLE: The Gate NAME: Alexander Schmid COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: alex.schmid@t-online.de WEBPAGE: http://home.t-online.de/home/alex.schmid/ray.htm TOPIC: magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: My self written ray tracer TOOLS USED: xv, gimp, xpaint RENDER TIME: 3 days HARDWARE USED: P133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Sometimes you open a door to somewhere you for shure don't want to be.... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was create with my self written ray tracer. If you look close you may notice I spent much work for the details: for example look at the flame, it not only changes it's color from blue to yellow it also changes the degree of seeing through. Also take a look at the table cloth. It has a structure through a specialy written shader. There were some problems of course: i had to learn that it's not wise to combine volumestepping (used for the smoke) and distribution ray tracing (used for the slight depth of field effect). The rendering times were awfull! So I had to change the stepping width and the reduce the number of rays per pixel. This led to the noise in the front of the scene (the hand is far away from the rest). By the way: the hand model I used is downloaded from the avalon server! Thank you very much! To make it short, the picture could have been in a much higher qualitiy, but I had not enough time to do it. Nevertheless it's the first time I entered the competition, and I am very proud that I've created the picture with my self written ray tracer. If you too are programming a raytracer, I would be nice to talk about ideas. Or if you have some other coments, hints, tips or critic, just mail me....