TITLE: "Baubles and Trinkets"

NAME: Kenneth J. Schnardthorst
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: ezekiel12@aol.com
WEBPAGE: None

TOPIC: Worlds within a world
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bauble.jpg
ZIPFILE: bauble.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    unofficial MegaPov v.0.7 by Nathan Kopp


TOOLS USED: 
    Lveiw Pro 1b for file conversion to jpg and titling. "How to Make
a Moon" tutorial by Matthew Corey Brown and "How to create a Planets
Atmosphere" tutorial by Darcey Johnston.  Steve Anger's "metals.inc" and
"golds.inc".  Everything else is straight up POV programing.


RENDER TIME: 
    1212 seconds total rendering time (20 minutes 12 seconds). The
design of scene took a total of two weeks.


HARDWARE USED: 
    Packard Bell M415 with Pentium 166 MMX using 32 megs of ram and a
VooDoo 5500 Graphics card with 64 megs of ram set at 4X antialiasing.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The image shows five planetary objects enclosed in glass
spheres and contained by gold wire frame cages.  The original idea for this
project was to enclose a galaxy inside of a crystal sphere using Chris
Colefax's galaxy include file unfortunately I could not figure out the
parameter to make the image small enough, so I used planets instead.  This idea
was inspired by the scene in the movie "Men in Black" where the cat had a
galaxy hung on it's collar.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I started first by setting up my
scene files.  I do this by setting the standard scene includes plus any other
includes that I might need.  Then I set up my camera, lighting, and a basic
background.  The global settings allowed for photons to be shot, while the
light source was the initiator of the photons using media attenuation and
photon reflection and refraction.
        With that done I then proceeded to make the first wire cage, this is the
one around the object on the far left side of the picture.  The cage is made by
a series of cylinders that are differenced by hollow cylinders in their
centers.  They are place so that they form the structure of the cage, then
given a gold texture.  A small gold sphere was then place on top and another
cylinder ring was placed through it.  A sphere was then centered inside of the
structure and sized to be almost the as large as the interior of the cage.  I
gave the glass a transparent look by setting the pigment to a near white color
and giving it some strong filtering.  I then gave it an index of refraction
close to that of glass crytal using the interior statement.  The glass spheres
are hollowed by using the hollow statement.  The strings holding the caged
objects are simple toruses that were warped to make them look like lanyards and
given simple pigments.  As you notice in the picture there are two different
cages for the spheres, they are both made the same way just manipulated
differently.
        The planetary objects were made following the instructions found in
Darcey Johnston's and Matthew Brown's tutorials.  I will not go into any detail
on how to make them as the tutorial's can be found in the archive section of
the POVRay website.  I had made the planet's that I used in the scene file
about six month's ago while experimenting with different functions of POVRay
3.1g and then MegaPov v0.7.  I just copied these over to this scene file and
remanipulated there colors to get what I wanted.  The ringed planet was the
hardest, however I finally figured out that if you difference out a cylinder
with an open cylinder then give it an onion texture modifier and a color map
you get some nice concentric rings.
        After each object was completed at the origin of the picture, they were
then translated to their final position.  I then changed my basic background to
two intesecting planes that were given a bumpy texture.  This way my objects
were able to cast shadows and reflections.

