TITLE: Electric Lamp
NAME: Martin Roth
COUNTRY: Switzerland
EMAIL: roth@ens.ascom.ch
WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2571
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION
JPGFILE: elamp.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    LView for conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    60h 17min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Sparc Ultra 1

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 There's not much to say, really. I'm trying to show what could be a physic
professor's
 latest gadget, some years after Thomas Alva Edison came up with the great idea
to use
 electricity to make light.
 I hope this still fits the topic.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

 Firstly I made the fine wire, which is a union of 3000 spheres. Since that
didn't look
 bright enough I put 30 spherical halos around them. 
 The hardest part was to get the glas right, in order to make it look "ancient".
It's
 a Surface Of Revolution, it took me some time to put the points correctly. Is
there
 a tool for doing this?
 The glass is actually hollow (like in the real world), i.e. not just a SOR, but
a SOR 
 with a smaller SOR cut out of it. Since this is not visible in the image I
might have
 skipped this part, making the rendering faster. I'll try this now...
 The other objects are simple CSGs, exept for the plaque, which is a height
field. 
 What made the rendering take so long is the number of light sources: There is
one
 where the camera is and 5 in the light bulb. With just 2 light sources it took
only
 10 hours, but then I had very stong, unrealistic looking shadows under the
bulb.

 If you'd like the source file, feel free to email me.

