TITLE: Loot NAME: Ben Chambers COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: chambers.ben@juno.com TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 RENDER TIME: ~12 Hours HARDWARE USED: AMD K6-233 w/64RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Kar'Neth was not happy. His light red flame pulsed in agitation. He had never liked dealing with that old man. There were too many... irregularities about him. But that old wizard was not the problem - these records were. His Master had charged him with finding these records and, now that they were found, Kar'Neth was sure his Master would not be happy. Tint'ge, for one, couldn't care less about the difficulties which lay ahead. From his vantage point behind the stand, he could see that it wasn't even polished all the way to the wall. Now, a really devoted man would have polished the entire chamber. "What is this case?" asked X'erx. "It doesn't seem to be glass, or crystal. Perhaps this is what the old man spoke of?" It seemed that, by some unwritten agreement, the Ainur would not say the name of Mahonri. When they had finally located the man, he had gone so far as to state that "the Records are protected by my Lord, the One and True Living God. Moreover, if you do not cease to work wickedness and leave your Master, your souls shall be cast out, into the great Darkness that is beyond." Kar'Neth had, in return, killed the old man. He had no illusions about his Master's evil - anyone who thought him less than the Devil was seriously deluded - but he did not believe the God which Mahonri spoke of was all- powerful. Especially if his Master gained possession of these plates. For, engraved deep inside, were the secrets of life... the power to control water. "...I mean, look at all of it!" went on Tint'ge, snapping Kar'Neth back to the present. He realized that the blue Ainur was now talking of the expanse of water beneath them. "Why, if the old man had so much, would he just WASTE it by leaving it in here?!? These vines live in luxury, when everything else on this barren world fights for drops!" The words he actually used were "barren universe", but Kar'Neth knew what he meant to say. Tint'ge had not yet had the privilege of traveling through the Gates, and so did not realize how small the world he lived on was. "The ways of that . . . heretic . . . do not concern us," replied Xerxes. "Of far greater urgency is the seal placed on the plates. More than two thirds are locked! Even if the way to break the case is found, there is no guarentee that we may open the seal!" "The seal will be broken," interrupted Kar'Neth. "Our Master has given us a charge, and we shall carry it out. If the servants of the Father may be kept away for just a short time longer, all shall be lost for them, and our Master shall surely triumph..." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For this scene, I used POV-Ray 3.1 on Win98. My computer is a K6-233 with 64 megs of RAM and a static swap file of 128megs. Parse time is 6 minutes, 58 seconds. Render time is 12 hours, 19 minutes, 12 seconds. In case you are curious, I have included the ray->shape intersections at the bottom (the results can be quite interesting). The scene is composed of 6 principle sets - the room, the stand, the plates, the pixies, the vines and the water. The room itself is composed of two inverse hemispheres joinded together at y=0. The texture is an agate pigment (dark blue to gray) with a granite normal to give it a rough, uncut appearance. The stand is a CSG difference of a box and cylinders so that the outer edges begin vertical (at the top) but slowly begin to slop out until they meet the floor. The pigment is the same as the one used for the room, but it has a high specular and a moderate reflection to make it look shiny and polished. It gradually fades, though, towards the bottom and the back (as though whoever polished it never got around to finishing the job). The records were done with CSG. Each individual plate is composed of a box, four cylinders (for the sides) and four spheres (for the corners). The seal was accomplished with four boxes (and two cylinders each for the edges), with rounded courners connecting them. To accomplish the corners, I used differences between a large cylinder and a small cylinder, then applied torii(sp?) to the edges to smooth them. The binding rings were created with torii and cylinders. The rings, seals and sealed plates use a gold texture I created for them, with an rgb of <.75,.75,.25>, a high metallic specular and small reflection. The unsealed plates use an image map I created with Paintbrush. The image was filled with the same color used for the sealed plates, then I just typed something with the Symbol font (I would have preferred Hebrew characters {they look a whole lot cooler than the Latin ones, besides being quite a bit older} but I don't have an appropriate font). I don't remember what I typed - I think it might have been some Shakespeare. Anyway, if you actually take the time to look at the image map and figure it out, then you've got _way_ too much time on your hands. The same finish was applied to both the unsealed and sealed portions of the plates. The pixies are macros. They are media-filled spheres with a spherical density. The light being emmitted from them comes from the volume lights of my lights.inc file. Essentially, it fills a sphere with a number of dimmer light sources so that the total intensity is the same as if there were one light of the supplied density. I've found that a stepping value of 5 works best as a compromise between speed and quality for the light sources in this scene. The vines are also done via macros. I supply the macro with the value to rotate about the y-axis, the number of segments to use, the base thickness of the vine, the number of segments to use in the random spline, and an arbitrary amount that the vines should "crawl" (deviating from the spline). Oh, yeah - I also give it a seed number for the random stream. The vines are made of chains of cones linked by spheres. The texture is a solid green (green .5) with a wrinkles pattern (wrinkle .5) scaled rather small (.025) for effect. The water is a flat plane with a blue color and filter applied. I used a ripples normal pattern, scaled large enough that the rings appeared to start moderately far apart, and a high frequency so that there would be enough rings for the surface to be interesting. For this scene, I set a global ambient value of 0 so that ALL illumination would be coming from the Pixies. All objects are declared in bcwater.inc, which is included in bcwater.pov. This makes it easy to comment out certain portions for debugging and quick rendering. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Box 508164026 269914785 53.12 Cone/Cylinder 790436078 118376570 14.98 CSG Intersection 701018884 360174526 51.38 CSG Merge 61219482 47904433 78.25 CSG Union 36568002 4420545 12.09 Plane 895116384 277640898 31.02 Sphere 1005040013 582229587 57.93 Torus 18713093 1553142 8.30 Torus Bound 18713093 1757117 9.39 Bounding Object 501905861 210182269 41.88 Bounding Box 1225491255 586115615 47.83 Light Buffer 9583463456 4533066938 47.30 Vista Buffer 17703138 12501206 70.62 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roots tested: 1757117 eliminated: 944496 Calls to Noise: 208705770 Calls to DNoise: 192728686 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Media Intervals: 1058235 Media Samples: 1058235 (1.00) Shadow Ray Tests: 372564304 Succeeded: 169558684 Reflected Rays: 373693 Total Internal: 37250 Refracted Rays: 319341 Transmitted Rays: 428523 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Smallest Alloc: 26 bytes Largest: 59152 Peak memory used: 111605592 bytes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Time For Parse: 0 hours 6 minutes 58.0 seconds (418 seconds) Time For Trace: 12 hours 19 minutes 12.0 seconds (44352 seconds) Total Time: 12 hours 26 minutes 10.0 seconds (44770 seconds) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above story is entirely fictitious. As of October 21st I will have left for a mission for my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). I will be serving in the Chile, Santiago East mission for a period of 24 months. If, for any reason, you need to contact me, my Mother may be reached at chambersjec@juno.com, or possibly at judycham@jps.net. Remember, these e-mail addresses are for my Mother, so please no frivolous emails. I will not have email during the period of my mission. ...Chambers, Benjamin David. Ray->Shape Intersection Tests Succeeded Percentage