EMAIL:cfusner@enter.net
NAME:Charles Fusner
TOPIC:Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Mystic Echoes
COUNTRY:USA
WEBPAGE:http://www.enter.net/~cfusner
RENDERER USED:POV-Ray 3.02
TOOLS USED:Paint Shop Pro (image maps and JPEG conversion). That's all folks
RENDER TIME:20 hours 27 minutes
HARDWARE USED:Pentium 150
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
On a marble table, in the wooden panelled halls of a vacation home in
one of Catherine's favorite Ages, we see the note, and the gift he had
left for her lying out, as though she has recently seen them. Perhaps
even now she has left to meet Atrus in this exciting, wonderous new Age
he describes in his note...

Magic?... easy topic. Myst. Certainly the topic is fulfilled by the 
implied magic of the D'ni linking books in the upper left (truly a neo-
classic fantasy element! The concept deserves a spot next to Middle Earth
in the hall of fame). But just for some added magic, I threw in three 
colorful, self luminescent gemstones, and of course, the note -- 
expressing True Love,the greatest magic of all.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Have you ever had the impression that a given idea for an image comes
with a curse attached? I almost thought that of this one. First, the topic
is announced early. So I have extra time to work on it, right? Wrong. An
unbelievably catastrophic series of events kept putting this image off
again and again. When I finally got to work on it, every texture wanted to
be difficult (even, curiously, the ones that I reused from previous projects
which was odd). And of course there was the late discovery that radiosity
and transmit don't seem to like one another (I'm still investigating that
one). 

Well, you get the idea. I had planned more for the background -- a
window overlooking a garden perhaps, crowned with some such complex 
mechanical gizmo as Atrus is famous for filling his Ages with. But in the
end, I had to trim it down and settle for a detailed development of the
primary subjects. The linking books in the background were a last minute
addition because too much empty wall space would have been terribly boring
in spite of the fairly interesting wood panel texture I finally managed
to get to behave for me. Besides general prettiness <G> there are a 
couple of techniques here worth noting...

THE NOTE: First, I revived an old experiment of mine: I created a grey
scale gradient texture in POV, applied a turbulence warp, which is a
cool effect because turbulence itself can be rotated, due to the
fact that transformations can be applied both before and after a warp,
unlike standard turbulence. The effect I created was a "tattered" looking
border between light and dark, which I then loaded into PSP. This allowed
me to make an image map for my note which a tattered edge, across the
line from which was all pallette index 0 in the resulting GIF, so in the
image, the image_map itself allows me to have "tattered jagged edges" on
the note by making pallette index 0 100% transmittant, while using just 
a single bezier patch with a single GIF image map. The "stained" edges of
the note was an afterthought to enchance its weatherworn look.

GEMSTONES: The gems are prisms, carefully textured and re-textured to 
give them a sufficiently "gem-ish" quality. The points for prism were 
actually generated by POV, using a vrotate command, and then the results
dumped to a TXT file using the #debug stream so that I could simply cut
and paste points into a handmade prism (no modellers required, therefore).
The self luminescence is a fading light source at the center of each gem.
Initially I was going to let the filter value of the gem tint the light,
but the effect was terribly overdone, so I made those light sources 
shadowless (to keep them from interacting with the gems themselves) and
tinted the light color instead. The effect was much more subtle. In fact,
too subtle. It required the addition of a extremely faint halo
to each gem to accentuate the ever-so-slight coloration of the light.
There was some degradation of the smooth pure lines of the gem when
the image was converted to JPEG (where is PNG when you need it!) but there
is nothing that could be done about that. *sigh*

Special texture note: the white marble, of course, is a downscaled version
of the one I used in Exhibit Three-oh-One, and as for the green felt which
lines the wooden chest, kudos and much thanks to the folks who did pool
table images last round for finally showing me how to make that texture!