EMAIL:tglover@nettally.com NAME:Tim Glover TOPIC:Labratory COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE:Ultimate Chemistry Set COUNTRY:USA WEBPAGE:None RENDERER USED:PovRay 3.1 TOOLS USED:Moray 3.1, Paintshop Pro 3.11 (for creation of heightfield and conversion to jpeg) RENDER TIME: 12.96 days ( 9 sec.parse time) HARDWARE USED: Dell 233 mHz PentiumII, 64 Mbytes RAM, Win 95 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I'm a chemist (As in one who does chemistry - not a pharmacist) by training, so "Laboratory" for me means a Chemistry lab. My introduction to chemistry came many years ago in the form of a Gilbert Chemistry Set as a Christmas gift. You might remember them -- lots of little white, squarish bottles containing various odd chemicals -- powdered sulfur, logwood indicator, phenolphthalene, sodium nitrate, copper sulfate, etc. All sorts of fun, nasty smelling, messy experiments could be done -- learning about chemistry in the process. I just recently finished reading P.W. Atkins "The Periodic Kingdom" ISBN 0-465-07266-6, which describes the development of the periodic table, the discovery of the various elements, and the cyclicity of their various physical properties. He uses the literary device of the periodic table being a new land with different areas having different textures and characteristics. One of his figures shows the periodic table as a sort of 3D bar chart with bars being proportional to atomic size. To me, it resembled a series of pedestals to put something on. I've combined these two themes into my entry. It's a representation of the ultimate chemistry set -- not just a few "safe" chemicals to play with, but EVERY known element is there, each on its own pedestal made of the element! The pedestal's height is scaled to the cosmic abundance of each element. This is the proportion of all matter that each element makes up -- in the entire universe. (Yeah, I know, gaseous element's pedestals cannot support a bottle of the element. It's ART, ok ) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Each new submission I've done lately has had a skill theme. Usually, this is a new aspect of POVRay that I haven't yet used. I use the competition as an excuse to broaden my skills. This entry is no different. This entry's skill theme is textures. Almost every element has its own texture -- except the heaviest trans-uranium elements for which only a few atoms have been synthesized -- those I guessed at. Each texture is based on several descriptions of the uncombined element for various text and reference books. I've included ALL textures in the .inc file. If you HAVE to have an accurate texture for Tantalum or Francium, it's there. The pedestals are simple cubes, non-uniformly scaled. The bottles are CSG'd from circular lathe objects -- they're meant to resemble the standard 40 ml vials used in water sampling. Gaseous elements are also CSG'd as the interior of the bottle, while solid and liquid elements have some volume removed by a CSG difference with a cube. Test tubes are also lathe objects. The spilled powder on the benchtop is actually the tops of a heightfield -- a trick I learned from ??? - a guy that posted a REALLY neat fossil in rock about two years ago. Thanks! Test tube rack, bench top, walls (seen and unseen), and roof are all stretched cube primitives. Wall tile is brick texture modified to resemble terra-cotta tile that was on the wall in my undergrad lab. Lighting is pretty conventional main and fill lights . Rendering was with radiosity and focal blur -- no AA. Warning! lots of glass+radiosity+high confidence focal blur settings = LONG renders. I spent the better part of two weeks staring at a 0 PPS screen. Also note -- working title was "Periodic Kingdom", so source is "perking9a.*"