EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com NAME: Bob Franke TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Modern Alchemy COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 beta 4 TOOLS USED: POV, Poser2 and PhotoStyler for jpeg conversion RENDER TIME: 28 hours 18 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350, 96 Mb & Windows NT IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Alchemy is an occult art and pseudoscience based on the belief that there are four basic elements--fire, air, earth and water--and three essentials: salt, sulfur and mercury. Its practitioners' main goals have been: (1) to turn base metals into precious metals (like gold or silver) (the transmutation motif); (2) to create a potion or metal which could cure all ills {the medical motif), and (3) discover an elixir which would lead to immortality (the transcendence motif). In the Middle Ages alchemy became big business. Charlatans, calling themselves alchemists, received large grants from the very rich with the promise of being able to turn lead or mercury into gold. The trick was to milk this scheme as long a possible and then get out of town before the hoax is discovered. These individuals have been known to be hung from golden gallows. Today, small quantities of mercury have been converted to gold with the use of a particle accelerator. In my image there is a modern day alchemists taking advantage of the quiet night shift for the unauthorized conversion of mercury onto gold. The only problem is that he is using a research cyclotron and the gold is being created at the cost of one million tax payer dollars per gram. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is a fictitious cyclotron, constructed almost exclusively with solid construction geometry. The man on top the ladder, peering into the collision chamber, was done with Poser 2. The cyclotron is surrounded with an array of anti-matter power supplies. The highly dangerous central portions are shielded with blue containment barriers, created with the new media function. POV was used to create the bitmap for the sheet metal on the power supply coils. The random function was used to determine the color of the individual sheets. The scene is illuminated with 30 3x3 area lights, one dim shadowless light, a couple of lights inside the cyclotron and a bright light inside the collision chamber. Without the area lights, the image only takes two hours to trace. Because the rectangle for the area lights is small, the shadows came out more sharply defined than I expected. To save space, the bitmaps for the computer screens and the sheet metal and the Poser object were not included.