EMAIL: karl@pemail.net	
NAME: Karl Manning
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRAY v3.00e Windows 95
TOOLS USED: Paper, coffee, Jeweller's brochures
RENDER TIME: 9h 10mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133, 32M memory
TITLE: Crystal Display
COUNTRY: England
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl/index.htm

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This shows several objects created in the style of Swavoski crystal on display in mirrored case.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This is my first image created using version 3 of POVray, having used version 2 for the last year. Indeed, it would not have been possible to create this image in version 2, as I have made extensive use of the #while looping directives.

The basic unit in the scene is the crystal ball, shown in the middle. This is created by intersecting planes rotated within a #while loop.

This was squashed, stretched, and chopped about to form the other shapes. The crystal colouring was created after a lot of time spent peering into jeweller's windows. It is a very light greyish colour, with high incidence of refraction, and some reflection.

The background mirror was simple enough to create by putting reflection up to 0.98, and using a hexagon pattern to prevent it from being too flat. However it raised a question. What colour is a mirror ? I was looking at one for ages before realising that it has no colour, but shows the colours of it surroundings. I also then realised that it has to have something to reflect. I changed the default background colour to a light yellow and created a bar with the lights on it.

On a final (irrelevant !) note, until just before Christmas I had been using a 486 75mhz pc to generate my raytracing. This was getting a bit slow. So I went and bought a pentium 133 (intel) - great, images which had been taking 2 hours now took 5mins to create. Then the topic of glass was announced, pah, even on max priority of rendering it took over 9 hours to generate this image, and thats without anti-aliasing ! Looks like I'll just have to save for *another* new pc !



Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net

16/2/97


