EMAIL: ayk@students.cs.mu.oz.au
NAME: Adrian Koh
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Don't try this at home ...
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: none yet
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1g ( for linux )
TOOLS USED: The gimp ( for adding copyright text and converting to jpeg )
RENDER TIME: 9 minutes 48 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
    This is the first time I've entered the competition so I wished to keep
    to a moderately straightforward theme. All in all, the image turned out
    much better than I first anticipated. 

    I'm hoping that the pink puddle of liquid, the test tube spilling
    corrosive green liquid and the black ( burn? ) marks on the floor and wall
    will signal to the viewer that the experiments occurring here are not very
    safe. What will happen to the liquid currently being heated?

    And thanks to my brother, G. Koh for suggesting the corrosive liquid
    from the test tube and the hole that it creates in the floor.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

    ( Sorry if the description is overly long. It's not that I think I've done
      something amazingly grand, but I believe the spirit of the competition 
      *is* about learning, so maybe what I've written may help someone with
      less experience.  I sure know that it's been a long journey to get where
      I have - and there's still so much to learn :-) ).

    This image kind of came to me in parts. I originally set out doing the
    bunsen burner because I wanted to see if I could actually do an acceptable
    flame. I used an emitting media with a spherical color map. The media was
    enclosed by a hemisphere ( suitably scaled to produce the elongated 
    flame). I also used a differently scaled version of this to represent the
    flame impacting on the bottom of the crucible.
    
    Thanks to Michael Hough who wrote a very good tutorial on using
    media for producing water. I found this invaluable for my understanding of
    how medias are used. The link to this tutorial is somewhere on the
    www.povray.org site.

    Once I'd created the bunsen burner , I added the tripod, gauze mat and
    crucible as elements which I thought complemented a bunsen burner. 
    These, along with the bunsen burner and test tube are all constructed from
    simple primitives using CSG.

    I added the wall so that the viewer would not see too much of the plane 
    ( which would make the image look too empty - a concept I also read from
    someone's tutorial but I can't remember where this was ). The wall is
    actually constructed from individual polygons so that I could have
    dividing strips between the planks and also so that I could randomly alter
    the wood texture from one plank to the next. The black stains are produced
    by a wrinkles normal pattern.

    The puddle of pink liquid and the test tube were added to contribute
    to the context of the image, and also to fill space. The puddle is
    produced by a macro I wrote a while ago for producing puddles ( first time
    I've used it in an actual scene, though ). The macro randomly places blob
    components in a grid but tries to constrain it so that the puddle is a
    smooth surface.  I also used the puddle macro to cut the hole in the
    floor, since it gives a nice shape for this. 

    The gas from the crucible and from the hole in the floor are both produced
    using emitting medias again. The medias are pretty much the same as the
    one used for the bunsen burner except for different color maps, scaling
    and turbulence.

    The liquid in the crucible is created by using an absorption media. The
    bubbles are randomly placed, semi-transparent spheres. The sizes of the
    spheres are also randomly different.

    The floor uses a layered texture. The bottom layer uses a quilted normal.
    The top layer has a semi transparent wrinkles pigment, plus a wrinkles
    normal. This top layer serves to make the black stains on the floor.