TITLE: No Night There
NAME: Mr. Ashley McGlone
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: ashley@premierweb.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.premierweb.net/users/ashley/welcome.html
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nonight.jpg
ZIPFILE: nonight.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    PovRay 3.02

RENDER TIME: 
    22 minutes 2 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 150, 16 megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is my first IRTC entry, and I am a green newbie at raytracing.
I do not expect to win anything, but I wanted to have the experience
of the IRTC process.  I certainly enjoy raytracing as a hobby.

This image is based on various scriptures in the Bible from the
book of Revelation chapters 4 and 22.  The title "No Night There"
comes from Revelation 22:5 where it says that night will be no
more in Heaven because God will be the eternal light.  This image is
really not finished, but I've got a basic start on what I want to
do with it.

In the future I would like to try some other Bible scenes that lend
themselves to graphics.  I've already got a descent crucifixion scene
(descent by newbie standards anyway).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All of the humanoid forms in this image are composed of spheres and
cylinders.  (I didn't learn how to scale these objects until it was
too late.)  I created God first, and then modified that code to
create the kneeling worshiper of fire and the 24 elders prostrate
around the throne.

The thrones are all the same code.  They were created with some boxes,
differences of boxes, cylinders and a torus.  Simple, but nicely shaped.

The green rainbow is straight out of the PovRay docs.

I really didn't do much with textures here except for the water.  I
got the WaterTexture.inc from Jamis Buck (buck@cs.byu.edu,
http://students.cs.byu.edu/~buck/) on the IRTC discussion e-mail list.

The river proceding from the throne of God is the difference between a
cone on the z-axis and the golden plane, with the river being a sub-plane
that is only exposed in the difference for the river bed.

The crowns are the intersection of two tori with spheres rotated around
the edges for 12 jewels in the crowns.  (There's actually a little more to
it than that if you look at the code.)

The fire balls (The Seven Spirits of God) and the fire worshiper (a
seraphim, which means "fire" in Hebrew) were done using a couple
halos to get the fire fill effect.  I still haven't quite got the
hang of halos, but these fires look close enough.

My big acheivement in this exercise was the rotation of the 24 elders,
thrones, and crowns.  I created some code that would rotate them around
the focal point of God's throne and keep them all facing the center.
This was a lot of fun to create, and when it actually worked my jaw hit
the floor.  I only wish you could see these from a top-down angle.  The
symmetry and geometric beauty is incredible.  From this I learned how
to use #While and #Declare to program loops.