EMAIL: sedi@geocities.com
NAME: Darren Izzard (SeDi)
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Elementary
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/4156
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 beta 4 (Win95)
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 4 (for creating the imagemaps)
            POV-Ray 3.02 (Win95) (earliest stages of development)
RENDER TIME: 28 hours 48 minutes 26.0 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133, 10Mb
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

After I read someone (I think it was one of the competition admins) on the
IRTC discussion list say that the important thing about the topic was the
actual word or phrase of the topic - in this case "Elements" (not the text
which is supplied with it on the IRTC website) - I decided I'd try and see
how many meanings for "elements" I could come up with. This image is the
result.

The picture is of a number of objects, most of which are on a tabletop
in the middle of a large room with no roof, while a storm rages outside.
Here is a list of the objects visible in the scene, together with their
relevance...
(1) Electric Heater - My dictionary gives "heating element" as a possible
    meaning. The heater I've designed has three heating elements, all turned
    onto maximum.
(2) Cloudy Sky with Lightning - Most people should be aware of the phrase
    "the elements," meaning the weather.
(3) Flames on Top of the Wall - It's fire (of earth, air, fire, water fame).
    Furthermore, the flames are giving off a little smoke (look carefully...)
    which, if I remember rightly, is mainly carbon (see number 5).
(4) Beaker of Boiling Water - Water, same relevance as fire. Why is it
    boiling? It's been left in front of an electric heater! (And if you're
    wondering why it's pink, that seems to be due to a combination of the
    refracted blue wallpaper and the reddish light from the heater's
    elements.) [the steam didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, admittedly]
(5) Atom - A stylized carbon atom. (I hope I got the numbers of each particle
    right. The sizes are wrong, otherwise they wouldn't really be visible!)
    Carbon is an element from the periodic table.
(6) Tiles from the Periodic Table - Same relevance as the atom. (Unnilpentium
    was chosen purely as a half-attempt at a joke about the name. But,
    according to my encyclopaedia, it is an element all the same.)
(7) Periodic Table on the Wall - Same relevance. However, if you look closely,
    you should be able to see that it's missing the tiles stacked at the
    front of the picture.
(8) Text on the Wall behind the Heater - "a[5] b(7) c[1][2] d(1,e(5),f(g(2)))"
    are all array elements, as they would be referenced in various programming
    languages.
(9) Wallpaper - it's based on some diagrams from Euclid's "Elements."
(10)Cube with Edges and Vertices - an object exploded into its elements
    (facets, edges and vertices).
(11)Finally, the open-topped room allows in the air (see 3 and 4). Now, I
    know it isn't visible, strictly speaking, but you can see a few of its
    effects - in the turbulence of the steam, for example.

Despite all of this, I can imagine that some people might feel that my
interpretation is off-topic in some way. That's up to them to decide. I'm
happy with my picture, and its relevance.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I began this image in POV 3.02, but switched over to 3.1 beta a week or so
after it was released. I was learning to use the new features as I built up
this picture, and therefore they aren't as widely or appropriately used as
they might have been. Still, I'm generally quite pleased with how the media
effects turned out.

The sky is a sky_sphere using a magenta-grey-black bozo pattern with high
turbulence, to give the effect of clouds lit from below. The lightning is
provided by a second texture layer using agate. (I have used this for
lightning in the past, and it works quite well, although it does tend to
leave "spots" of lightning in the middle of the sky at times.)

The heater is made primarily out of a cuboid. The reflective interior is
cut out using a cylinder with CSG. The heating elements are linear area light
sources, each of which looks_like a thin horizontal cylinder with a small-
scaled scallop_wave x gradient for a "coiled" effect. The bars across the
front are metallic tori, cut in half and squashed so they don't curve
outwards too much. The switch on the side is also quite simple, consisting
of a few cuboids joined by CSG. The textures used on the heater are mainly a
wood pigment with turblence on each side, and a metallic texture with crackle
normals at the top and bottom. (I did experiment with a "dirty heater,"
where the reflective curved surface inside had spots of dirt or corrosion
on it, as I have seen on some real heaters of this type. However, this
made the image appear quite messy, so I switched back to the "clean"
version. The dirty surface can be switched on again in the POV source (in
the ZIP file) using a #declare near the top of the main file, in case
anyone's curious.)

The walls are simple cuboids, with a PNG image map applied. The windows
are inserted into the walls using CSG. The blocks on top are separated by
a row of small red cylinders. Above the blocks, there are flames. The fire
was made with the new media feature of POV 3.1, and actually turned out to
be easier to achieve than I had thought. Each flame is positioned randomly.
They are each made from emission media, with spherical density and high
turbulence, contained within a tall cone.

The beaker of boiling water consists of three parts: the glass beaker (a
lathed object with a simple PNG image map cylindrically applied, for the
measuring scale on the front), the boiling water and the steam. The water is
another fairly straightforward lathe, although it has been made precisely the
same size as the inside of the beaker - this allows POV-Ray's slight rounding
errors in dealing with the boundary between the water and the glass to provide
the visual boiling effect. I must admit that this was a lucky accident -
originally I had intended to design the boiling "by hand," but when I saw this
result I immediately decided to keep it.

The beaker's steam, again, was created using the new media features.
(Originally, I made it using a 3.02 halo, but it was fairly easy to convert
into a media.) There are two versions of it in the source. A very slow, but
realistic, scattering media, and a fast, but unrealistic, emission media.
The media is contained within a tall cylinder, with the same radius as the
inside of the beaker. It has a spherical density, with relatively high
turbulence.

The atom is quite simple. The nucleus is made of six neutrons and six protons
(I hope I got the numbers right for this). Each set of particles is arranged
at the vertices of an octahedron - or, if you prefer, at the centers of the
facets of a cube - and one set is rotated 45 degrees with respect to the
other. The six electron orbits are spheres positioned on semi-transparent
tori.

The blocks from the periodic table, stacked at the front, are basically
cuboids with image maps. They are created using a 3.1 macro, which takes
the name of the image map file to use. The choice of elements was
naturally purely arbitrary.

The periodic table hung from the back wall is made from lots of small
cuboids, each with an image map picked at random (using a 3.1 array)
from the blocks at the front. This looks quite realistic from a distance,
which is, of course, how it is seen in the final image. The blocks
are positioned using two nested loops and a relatively complex conditional,
which masks out the areas of the table where there should be no blocks.

The engraved text of the array elements, behind the heater, is a cuboid
with Arial Narrow text CSG-subtracted from it, all enclosed within a
wooden frame.

There are three main light sources in the scene: one high main white light,
one low blue light on the left, and one low orange-white light on the right.
The remaining lights in the scene are the heater's elements, as described
above.

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