EMAIL:		ewan@chmai2.loxinfo.co.th
NAME:		Ewan Grant
TOPIC:		Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: 	I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:		Creation
COUNTRY:	Thailand
WEBPAGE:	n/a
RENDERER USED:	PovRay3.5 [900x600 aa0.2]
TOOLS USED:	PSP7 (for .jpg conversion, contrast and name.)
RENDER TIME:	6h 47m
HARDWARE USED: 	AMD850

SCENE DESCRIPTION:
A tone sounds, vibrant in the nothingness. That tone would have destroyed all matter as we know it today but it was the first, there was nothing to shatter. The frequency changes, another tone joins. Sounds continue, multiplying in complete harmony. Light is born, and from that orchestra of light and sound, vibrations create matter. Judging by the way we know 
it today everything started to go downhill from that moment and continues to do so. Is it time to sound the horn and bring down the walls of jericho?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Initially I was perplexed by the topic, it seemed to me you could chose absolutely anything as a subject. For if the picture were taken with a camera it would be a 'frozen moment'. I had quite a few ideas before I came up with this one. It is one
of the earliest moments in time, before this there was nothing, No Thing! 

I imagined the picture to be ostensibly black but with a very apparent strong light. I came up with the idea of a glass sphere at centre with a range of spotlights focussed on it, spraying light through the scene. Then I added a torus with almost max filter and only a surface normal to reflect light, this was to represent the turbulence in the surrounding expanding space. The media was added and the picture went haywire. There followed long processes of tweaking until something approaching the final image came into being. The scene was rather empty. I added a new spotlight with a color_map and put a surface normal on the glass sphere. Then created a 'loose' form of matter, consisting of a reflective sphere inside a 'web' (or Van Allen Belt) of energy radiation. I scattered four of these through the scene. Rendering at 160x120 took around 12 minutes at one time so tweaking was a slow process. 

To be candid I really don't understand the photons, though they are definitely acting in the scene for if object settings are changed there are marked differences in the visibility of said object. The scene still looked quite empty so a second torus was added to indicate an incoming stream of energy. I feel it was unnecessary but there is more to look at. In terms of media and photons this has all been an experiment. A few steps into time, what would really be there to see? Well, it's my imagination and as it transpires, it's not black!

Thanks to Chris Colefax for Lens Inc, and, for once, I actually read some documentation and discovered the helpful '#declare effect_always_on_top' option.