EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr NAME: Miroslav Hundak TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Armagedon Lightning Bolt - level 18 COUNTRY: Croatia WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows 3.01 TOOLS USED: Milimeter paper and 0.5 carbon pencil RENDER TIME: see under description HARDWARE USED: see under description IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On this image you are suposed to see an interior of a mean looking castle tower, who's exterior is alegedly seen in the distance. The central piece is a clear crystal sphere without any special features, except that it is conviniently seated on something that shouldn't be standing still anyway, cause of a gravity pull, see? Anyhow, this sphere seems to be emanating some sort of magical field going upwards to the sky. The same effect can be seen happening in the tower in the distance. And in case you're wondering, yes that is an axe on the wall. Image is nothing fancy, but I kind of like it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I did this as simple as possible. Of all the scenes I made for this competition, this one took me the least time to build, and most time to render, which is no wonder when you consider the soft shadows from area light, large portion of the image being covered by a refracting transparent object, camera surounded by some heavy CSG, a large halo on top of everything and finaly +a0.2 option for antialiasing. I was unable to use my Pentium over the night so I had to use the less powerfull laptop for nightly rendering, which is why render time turned out to be more complicated and relative to machine. Here are the times: 486/66 1d 16h 55m 01s 202 lines P/100 13h 51m 39s 120 lines 486/66 9h 48m 20s 25 lines P/100 app. 3h 30m 23 lines P/100 9h 21m 14s 44 lines 486/66 10h 28m 16s 22 lines P/100 14h 11m 57s 113 lines 486/66 8h 04m 37s 18 lines P/100 app. 4h 00m 33 lines --------------------------------------- total 4d 18h 11m 04s 600 lines Very long time, isn't it? If you are very expirienced in all this you might notice a few glitches in the image. One is that the sky is red, but the ambient light I used is greenish-blue, as in the real world, but that's not very important anyway. Second, more serious, glitch is that, since the objects in scene would anyway cover the ground plane, there isn't any. However in the sphere located inside the distant tower you can see the whole gradient of sky sphere refracted through the glass, the upper part and the lower part too, which should be obscured by the ground plane. These glitches are only smaller ones, so I decided that going through the rendering process all over again would be just a bit over the top for my sanity.