EMAIL: albiaprime@aol.com NAME: Hugh & Anne Gregory TOPIC: Laboratories COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Geology Lab COUNTRY: CANADA WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/agre108/crafts/sagewood.html RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, sPatch, 3D Win, Paintshop Pro Demo RENDER TIME: 3 hours 37 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 160 Mhz, 40megsRAM; PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Laboratories come in many forms. The most numerous are the medical and food industry labs that take care of our health and safe guard the food we eat. Smaller in number are the more specialized scientific labs, some are for industrial research into new products, while an even smaller number are devoted to pure science and learning more about the universe around us. For this months topic we have chosen one of the rarer and more dangerous lab locations, that of a Volcano Observatory, in tribute to those brave souls who risk life and limb to bring to our understanding the mysteries and secrets of the inner workings of this planet we live on. In order for scientists to study volcanos, they have to study the composition of the rocks and gases that come out of a volcano in order to determine what lies hidden underneath their feet. So, we decided to contribute for this topic a Geology Laboratory or "GeoLab" for short. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is Hugh's first and our fourth joint IRTC entry. A majority of the artistic placement of items within the GeoLab was his work. Inspiration for this scene was drawn from several sources... 1.) our own personal visits to volcanos in Hawaii, as well as Mounts St Helens and Rainer, just across the Canada-USA border, in Washington State, south of our home in B.C.. 2.) having a friend who just received his Ph'd in Vulcanology and our many hours chatting with him about his work at a Volcano Observatory. First Hugh used Leveler again, this time to build the volcanic mountain on which to place our laboratory. On the top of his mountain he made a a depression in the top center for the caldera and deep shaft in the centre of the caldera in which to place our lava lake. Next he built, using primitives, the foundation and structural frame of our lab which he textured to make it a wooden frame building. This included a floor made up of spaced individual interlocking 2x4's. The ceiling joists were also cross braced. Sheet Beziers were then generated to make the sheet metal exterior walls and roof. He also sectioned off one corner with internal walls and sheet metal for a bathroom. While he was doing the basic structure work, I built a horseshoe shaped lab work table, a kitchen table and chairs for the dining area, a kitchen area cupboard-counter comb with a sink and faucet, a toilet and hand basin for the bathroon and a desk with chair for the an office corner. These were then installed in the completed structure. Hugh then went to work installing florescent lights, electrical conduits, junction boxs and power outlet recepticals and openable windows with frames and glass. He also hung a wood and sheet metal door on the bathroom cubical and installed the same on the lab's entrance door next to the desk. Just in case the view we selected looked out that doorway or the window over the desk he also built and installed a walkway with railings and a set of stairs leading up to a platform on the caldera's rim. While he was doing that I started designing and building the lab accessories (bottles and flasks, seismometers, scientific scales and text books, rocks), the kitchen accesories (coffee mugs, plates, sugar bowl, cream jug, coffee machine, cookie jars and so on), and the desk accessories (ink blotter, telephone, filing cabinet and "in-out" paper trays). Next we did a series of "test shots" from various locations inside our lab to determine what would be the best view. We settled on a view looking in from just outside the window over the desk. This looks in and across the lab and kitchen areas. For dramatic effect at this time we decided to add a balcony as the lab was right next to the edge of the lava lake central pit and put in a back door. To properly show the setting of "GeoLab" Hugh built a small security cam type TV monitor with two small TV screens. We then rendered two shots, one from the balcony looking down at the Lava Lake and one from the Caldera Rim platform show the lab's precarious position next to the Lava Lake pit. Both of these renderings were about 30 minutes each and were image mapped onto the TV screens of the TV monitors, which we placed on the left side of our desk (right side of view in the final artwork), where they would be clearly visible and understandable in the final image. Next came the tricky part of creating a visible Lava Lake "glow", to be seen just through the open balcony door. To achieve this effect Hugh took our traditional hollow sphere for the sky, made it non-hollow and then differenced a cube from it, leveling the top of the now hollow cube just below the balcony floor and extending all the way across the lava lake pit. Then he experimented with Moray's Fog feature. We discovered that Ground Fog 5 feet thick vertically and set to 10 ft visibility would make a beautiful glowing reddish mist if we lowered our whole mountain and lab down until "zero" was only 5 feet below the lab floor. Voila! Lava Lake glow had been created. This of course necessitated reshooting both of our TV security cam images, with the fog effect pushing their rendering time up from 30 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes for each. Finally Hugh spent a week "decorating" the inside of our lab with all the accessories I had been working on over the past weeks. At the same he adjusted the lighting to created sunlite patches of light on the floor of the lab, shining in the open door and windows. The final step was to ensure image visibility. After receiving comments of our previous IRTC entries being too dark, we visited several friends to "test view" a GeoLab JPG on their systems. On returning home we 1.)...adjusted down the brightness and contrast on Hugh's monitor to make the image look like what we had seen at our friends 2.)...in Moray adjusted upwards the brightness of our sun and GeoLab's interior lights and test rendered over and over until we thought we had it right. This resulted in a greyish instead of black lava, but at our friends we discovered that our black lava just couldn't be seen out the windows and back door so we added spot lights and increase material ambience (we also had to rerender the TV Monitor images as as well). Then we then took this adjusted GeoLab JPG over to our friends and viewed it again on their computers. We hope that you like the final product of our efforts this time. The 800 by 600 BMP took just over 3 hours and 37 minutes to render on POV using my Pentium II - 350. The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with a Demo version of Paint Shop Pro I downloaded off the internet set to 6% compression to get the file down under the IRTC maximum file size of 250kb. We Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright "Geo Lab" is Copyright(c)2000 Hugh & Anne Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.