TITLE: je_magic.jpg
NAME: Joost Egelie
COUNTRY: Belgium
EMAIL: joost.egelie@skynet.be
WEBPAGE: Working on it. When uploaded, should behttp://www.skynet.be/users/81504/

TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: je-magic.jpg
ZIPFILE: je-magic.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray version 3.02a.f1 .MacCodeWarrior

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    19hrs 40min 56sec +/- 30min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Macintosh Performa 6200/12MB(24 with VM) running Motorola
speed604.lib on a PPC603@75MHz chip

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    "Behold the future in my magic crystal ball... And hence,
it's the new POV-Ray 4.0 Tracer! With again a shipload of magical features, of
which few are yet supported by any raytracer... Yea, this will be the Chosen
Tracer which will defeat all other raytracers...", said the Magician.
The future within a crystal ball, glowing in the moonlit room with silk curtains
on the walls. The sudden sigh that escaped my throat blew out the candle which
withheld evil spirits from the Tarot cards. The Hermits face on the card
predicted a devastating change in the Virtual World, therefor I moved the
candle so I wouldn't have to see it. Cold shivers tickeled my spine as I lay my
eyes on the dusty cover of the Magicians Handbook: "Ye Olde Persistence Of
Vision Handbook Of 3D Magics"...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I used mans most expensive tool there
is: Time... To get the halos perfect, the atmosphere straight, the lights
interacting properly... Weeks went over it. And suddenly I realized the
deadline was creeping nearby, hour by hour. I was afraid I wouldn't have it
rendered in time, since a 160x90 preview took an hour to render. But the main
800x450 (which is 16:9 aspect ratio, a new standard) rendered amazingly fast,
since it would take about 27 hours according to my rough calculations: 2
powered by (800 divided by 160) times the rendering time of a 160x90 image. I
guess the radiosity doesn't follow this estimation.
Furtheron I used Adobe Illustrator to create the childish wallcurtain pattern
and the magical bookcover, but I could have used any vector image program. I
tend to use Illustrator since I'm well accustomed to it from out my job
(prepresser). The same goes up for Adobe Photoshop, which I only used to
convert the vector images to gif files and to crop size the three card images.
Another note: the little pictures of the zodiac and their symbolic
representatives are all from the font "Zeal". It's the first time I find a goal
to use this font.
The three card images come from the Internet, from the sources below:

The Salem Tarot Page: Guide To Witchcraft, Salem, and Tarot.
http://www.salemtarot.com/

Astrology, Tarot & Jung / Home Page of Anthony Louis (mailto:tonylouis@aol.com)
http://members.aol.com/tonylouis/home/index.html

I would like to thank the people responsible for these websites, for providing
the pictures while publishing it on the freely accessible Internet. Anthony
Louis is the writer of a Tarot book, presenting it on his website. The Salem
Tarot Page is a most remarkably well constructed webpage and very pleasant to
check out.

If you take a look at the je_magic.pov code, you'll notice I wrote it in an
explanatory way, so you can muddle around in it. I've used the POV-Ray 3.0 new
declaration and testing directives to create switches which you can use to take
other camera positions, adjust image quality, or to switch on and off time
consuming effects. The last part helped me a lot while creating and "debugging"
objects, textures and effects. In addition, I added parser text outputs, so you
can see what's going on while the parser is reading the scene file.

Final note: I took the effort to make a just-blown-out candle, because since
POV-Ray 3.0 is out, everyone is using halos to make a little candle flame. This
proves that you can use halos to make other funny effects, too.

Now tamper around and have fun!

BTW.: I couldn't  include the OXFORD.TTF font, due to copyright issues
concerning fonts. And being a prepresser I'm well aware of these things.

JOOST EGELIE
joost.egelie@skynet.be

"'Virtual Reality'. This is a contradictio in terminis, since it really exists
in our Universe. We should rather use the term 'Real Virtuality'. And due to
the devine character its given by the millions of Internet users, we shall
speak in future of 'Ritual Vealtea'. Should this not be sufficient, call it
'Really Vacuous'. Then it's a term to indicate a big void, in which imaginative
things can happen... Hey! That is a Virtual Reality!"
Me.

