TITLE: Tycho Brahe
NAME: Francois Dispot
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: wozzeck@club-internet.fr
WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/vienna/7709
TOPIC: Math and Physics
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fdtycho.jpg
ZIPFILE: fdtycho.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    ---

RENDER TIME: 
    2d 5h 46m 24s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix P166+ w/ 32Mb Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer of the 16th century, who devellopped
new models of the universe, that led Kepler to his own laws.
You will learn much more about him at the Galileo project web site.

This picture is quite close to a drawing of Tycho Brahe in his own
observatory. Several instruments of his time can be seen in the back of the
picture. Most of them were of big size, because Tycho Brahe thought that
instruments had to be large to be precise. Thus the large size of the quadrant
in front of the picture.

INI file options:
Antialias=On
Sampling_Method=2
Antialias_Depth=2
Antialias_Threshold=0.1



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


As usual, everything was designed by hand with CSG.

The lighting of the scene was a hard -and perfectible- job, since I
didn't want the front walls to cast shadows on the rear ones. In fact, global
"no_shadow" schemes were not the good choice. I then decided to have the scene
lit from the back (as the sun would have done), with a second light in
front of the scene to moderate the shadows. This time, the front light is
shadowless, and some ambient/diffuse tuning was necessary.

The light ray was made using a halo: atmospheric rendering would have been too
long to render, and would have driven me to put the "sun" light at a wrong
place.
By the way, you will note that perspective had to be cheated sometimes... at
least three times in fact: try to figure out where and why!

A nice part is the table with its cloth. To model the folds, I had to design a
"new" quartic. I think it was well-known long before me, but I had never seen
it before and I found it really useful (cf. quadrant.inc).

The nicest part to me is the caption. Like the whole scene, it was made with
CSG. The text is not a mapping; it was made using the "text" object, and 3
different fonts (A standard one, another for the "_", and the last for the
"AE" letters).

