TITLE: Mystery Lights NAME: Ron Gow COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: rgow@lanset.com TOPIC: Mystery COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: lites_rg.jpg ZIPFILE: lites_rg.zip RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.5 TOOLS USED: Terragen, Bryce 5 Gilles Tran's Makegrass macro TomTreeM macro by Tom Aust & Gena Obukhov Paintshop Pro 7 used for conversion to .jpg RENDER TIME: PovRay: 1 hr 55 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 1.8gz 512 mg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Earth lights in an ancient stone circle. Earth Lights, also known as ghost lights and spook lights, have been seen in locations all around the world. A few of the more famous include the Min-Min lights in Queensland Australia, the Bodhisattva lights in Wutai, China, the Maco Station lights in North Carolina, USA, and the Hessdalen Valley lights in Norway. While this eerie phenomenon has mystified people for centuries, with some viewers swearing the lights acted as if intelligent, probably no sites are as mysterious as the sightings in the old stone circles at Avebury, England, or the Castlerigg circle in Cumbria, England. In 1919 the following description was given of the lights at Castlerigg by a T. Sington: "We saw a number of lights in the direction of the druidical circle. Whilst we watched, one of the lights came straight to the spot we were standing. At first very faint as it was approaching, the light increased in intensity. When it came close it slowed down, stopped, quivered and slowly went out." The only extensive scientific studies of the phenomenon are still being conducted at Hessdalen, where the lights have been recorded with film and radar. One possible clue to the origin is in the fact that the majority of sightings are near geological faults. Another theory is they are some type of piezoelectric effect of stone and earth. Both Avebury and Castlerigg lie along geological faults, and they certainly have lots of stone! Is either or both the answer to the Castlerigg circle lights? Or is it some mystic secret of the ancient druids? It's a mystery! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Stones were originally created in Bryce's terrain editor and rendered as an altitude mask render, which I then used as a height_field in POV. Earth lights are spheres containing scattering and emitting media and a bright light, then light_grouped with no global lights with softer lights for actual illumination. The only other light in the scene is the sun, a point light. Background hills from Bryce also, with trees done with the TomtreeM macro applied with the trace() macro. Grass done with Gilles Tran's Makegrass macro, and applied to another Bryce height_field using the trace() macro. (Guess what my Learn_New_Macro_Every_Round macro this round was...) Sky_sphere is a Terragen render, aided by some POV fog set to the same color as the dark clouds in the sky_sphere. A lot of thanks to Gilles Tran, Tom Melly and the others at the PovRay newsgroups for help with the fog & media. Textures are all procedural by me. Started a render with radiosity, but it was turning into a 100+ hour render so I aborted it. I wanted to try again with lower settings but didn't have time. Zip file contains everything except the grass & tree files, although I reduced the size of the bitmaps & converted them to .jpg to save space. Thanks to the voters in the last round for all the excellent comments, and good luck to everyone in this round.