EMAIL: panthus@xtra.co.nz
NAME: Dan S Allsop
TOPIC: Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Laboratory Table
COUNTRY: New Zealand
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1
TOOLS USED: Microsoft Picture It Express for JPEG conversion.
            JASC Paint Shop Pro 3 and Microsoft Word for image maps.
RENDER TIME: 40 hours 15 minutes (high priority, AA 0.3)
HARDWARE USED: Intel Celeron 500Mhz w/ Windows 98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION
A clutter of stuff from the first pioneering age of science.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This is my second time entering the POV-Ray competition.
I used this topic as a reason to learn more about POV-Ray and try lots
of things out for the first time, most especially splines and macros,
which I hadn't used before.  I started with the table and thought of 
all the objects I could put on it.  Because I didn't have a whole 
picture in mind, the composition probably doesn't hold together, but 
hopefully the objects are interesting.  I looked at an 'Antiques 
Roadshow' magazine for some inspiration but most of it comes out of 
my head.
The scrolls at the top right are a cubic prism formula which spirals
from the inside out and then back again to make a closed prism.  They
are then intersected with a cubic lathe to give them a tight middle
and flared ends, the lathe has a random, zig-zag spline on the ends to
jiggle the paper in and out.  I built this code as a macro with some
random bits to give a slightly different scroll each use.  The 
spiralling prism being intersected by a closing lathe makes the scroll 
come apart in shreds down the side but they are okay at this angle.
The book has a cubic prism for each page.  A #while loop formula
exponentially positions and bends each page to fit and randomly 
jiggles each a little up or down.  I built it to have any number of 
pages entered into initial parameters.  The book has 360 pages here 
and this looks right for the size of the spine (I didn't build a 
variable spine at this stage) with 160 on the left and 200 on the 
right.  The formula looks a little stupid with, say 10 left and 350 
right because the book wouldn't stay open like that and the pages get 
too bent on the high number side.
Random blobs are used for the fleshy thing in the flask top right and
the smudges of fluid on the microscope slides.
The microscope has a macro to make the screws, just a scaled sphere 
with a couple of boxes cut out, but calling it as a macro meant each 
use could be randomly rotated which looked more natural.  When I had
finished the microscope and textured it I found it looked too boring
and mono-coloured, so I built a macro, called after each piece of CSG,
which randomises the pigment and finish slightly and gives it more
variety.
The test tubes are a bit of CSG through a #while loop which randomly
does each liquid height and colour, each cork size, angle and colour
and angle of each tube.
I built the scales to have an initial parameter to control the rotation
of the balancing strut and countered the rotation in the code to keep
the trays level at any angle.
The hourglass is a cubic lathe with a mainly square, superquadric 
ellipsoid rotated onto its corner to give the rounded pyramid of 
powder within.
The pencil is a simple linear prism but I cut the tip of it with 
randomly rotated boxes to give it a knife-sharpened rather than modern
cone-sharpened look.
The bottles under the shelf on the right are CSG with contents of 2500
randomly scaled, rotated and positioned boxes.  To contour to a curved
edge I translated each box to the edge and then randomly rotated it 
around leaving an empty middle which saved on processing as well.
The cobweb is a union of cylinders with the end of the last becoming 
the beginning of the next and then a random point for the next end.  It
doesn't look like a cobweb should (it doesn't connect properly) but is
okay as background.
I tried a wood texture by a gradient colour pattern and lots of 
randomly positioned black hole warps but this didn't really work (just
looks like moire patterns all over).  I minimised the colour 
difference so it wasn't so noticeable but left it in because it was
a little different.
For the gifs I used for the book pages I typed in some of Malory's 
Morte D'Arthur in Winword and copied and pasted it into a Paint Shop 
Pro image.  The height field on the back wall is a multi-colour bozo
plane I rendered in POV-Ray and saved as a gif image, again in PSP 
(nb. in the zip file "wall.gif" is saved as "wall.jpg" to minimise the
size of file, it is massively compressed from 500K to 40K and has lost
a lot of detail).
The lamp has an area light and another two point lights at the same
position to bring the brightness through the glass cover, all with a
fade on them.  The outside light is an area light.  I don't like doing
lighting and am not good at it but decided this would have to do.
I have included the full code in the zip file in case anyone wishes to
play around with it, learn something from it or tell me how I could 
have done it all with half the effort.