TITLE: Loot
NAME: Ben Chambers
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: chambers.ben@juno.com
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bcwater.jpg
ZIPFILE: bcwater.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

RENDER TIME: 
    ~12 Hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-233 w/64RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        Kar'Neth was not happy.  His light red flame pulsed in agitation.  He
had
never liked dealing with that old man.  There were too many... irregularities
about him.  But that old wizard was not the problem - these records were.
His Master had charged him with finding these records and, now that they were
found, Kar'Neth was sure his Master would not be happy.
        Tint'ge, for one, couldn't care less about the difficulties which lay
ahead.  From his vantage point behind the stand, he could see that it wasn't
even polished all the way to the wall.  Now, a really devoted man would have
polished the entire chamber.
        "What is this case?"  asked  X'erx.  "It doesn't seem to be glass, or
crystal.  Perhaps this is what the old man spoke of?"
        It seemed that, by some unwritten agreement, the Ainur would not say
the
name of Mahonri.  When they had finally located the man, he had gone so far
as to state that "the Records are protected by my Lord, the One and True
Living God.  Moreover, if you do not cease to work wickedness and leave your
Master, your souls shall be cast out, into the great Darkness that is
beyond."
        Kar'Neth had, in return, killed the old man.  He had no illusions about
his Master's evil - anyone who thought him less than the Devil was seriously
deluded - but he did not believe the God which Mahonri spoke of was all-
powerful.  Especially if his Master gained possession of these plates.  For,
engraved deep inside, were the secrets of life... the power to control water.
        "...I mean, look at all of it!"  went on Tint'ge, snapping Kar'Neth
back
to the present.  He realized that the blue Ainur was now talking of the
expanse of water beneath them.
        "Why, if the old man had so much, would he just WASTE it by leaving it
in
here?!?  These vines live in luxury, when everything else on this barren
world fights for drops!"
        The words he actually used were "barren universe", but Kar'Neth knew
what
he meant to say.  Tint'ge had not yet had the privilege of traveling through
the Gates, and so did not realize how small the world he lived on was.
        "The ways of that . . . heretic . . . do not concern us," replied
Xerxes.
"Of far greater urgency is the seal placed on the plates. More than two
thirds are locked!  Even if the way to break the case is found, there is no
guarentee that we may open the seal!"
        "The seal will be broken," interrupted Kar'Neth.  "Our Master has given
us
a charge, and we shall carry it out.  If the servants of the Father may be
kept away for just a short time longer, all shall be lost for them, and our
Master shall surely triumph..."


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


For this scene, I used POV-Ray 3.1 on Win98.  My computer is a K6-233 with
64 megs of RAM and a static swap file of 128megs.  Parse time is 6 minutes,
58 seconds.  Render time is 12 hours, 19 minutes, 12 seconds.  In case you
are curious, I have included the ray->shape intersections at the bottom (the
results can be quite interesting).

        The scene is composed of 6 principle sets - the room, the stand, the
plates, the pixies, the vines and the water.

        The room itself is composed of two inverse hemispheres joinded together
at
y=0.  The texture is an agate pigment (dark blue to gray) with a granite
normal to give it a rough, uncut appearance.

        The stand is a CSG difference of a box and cylinders so that the outer
edges begin vertical (at the top) but slowly begin to slop out until they
meet the floor.  The pigment is the same as the one used for the room, but it
has a high specular and a moderate reflection to make it look shiny and
polished.  It gradually fades, though, towards the bottom and the back (as
though whoever polished it never got around to finishing the job).

        The records were done with CSG.  Each individual plate is composed of a
box, four cylinders (for the sides) and four spheres (for the corners).  The
seal was accomplished with four boxes (and two cylinders each for the edges),
with rounded courners connecting them.  To accomplish the corners, I used
differences between a large cylinder and a small cylinder, then applied
torii(sp?) to the edges to smooth them.
        The binding rings were created with torii and cylinders.
        The rings, seals and sealed plates use a gold texture I created for
them,
with an rgb of <.75,.75,.25>, a high metallic specular and small reflection.
The unsealed plates use an image map I created with Paintbrush.  The image
was filled with the same color used for the sealed plates, then I just typed
something with the Symbol font (I would have preferred Hebrew characters
{they look a whole lot cooler than the Latin ones, besides being quite a bit
older} but I don't have an appropriate font).  I don't remember what I typed
- I think it might have been some Shakespeare.
Anyway, if you actually take the time to look at the image map and figure it
out, then you've got _way_ too much time on your hands.
        The same finish was applied to both the unsealed and sealed portions of
the plates.

        The pixies are macros.  They are media-filled spheres with a spherical
density.  The light being emmitted from them comes from the volume lights of
my lights.inc file.  Essentially, it fills a sphere with a number of dimmer
light sources so that the total intensity is the same as if there were one
light of the supplied density.  I've found that a stepping value of 5 works
best as a compromise between speed and quality for the light sources in this
scene.

        The vines are also done via macros.  I supply the macro with the value
to
rotate about the y-axis, the number of segments to use, the base thickness of
the vine, the number of segments to use in the random spline, and an
arbitrary amount that the vines should "crawl" (deviating from the spline).
Oh, yeah - I also give it a seed number for the random stream.  The vines
are made of chains of cones linked by spheres.  The texture is a solid green
(green .5) with a wrinkles pattern (wrinkle .5) scaled rather small (.025)
for effect.

        The water is a flat plane with a blue color and filter applied.  I used
a
ripples normal pattern, scaled large enough that the rings appeared to start
moderately far apart, and a high frequency so that there would be enough
rings for the surface to be interesting.

        For this scene, I set a global ambient value of 0 so that ALL
illumination
would be coming from the Pixies.
        All objects are declared in bcwater.inc, which is included in
bcwater.pov.
This makes it easy to comment out certain portions for debugging and quick
rendering.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Box                          508164026       269914785     53.12
Cone/Cylinder                790436078       118376570     14.98
CSG Intersection             701018884       360174526     51.38
CSG Merge                     61219482        47904433     78.25
CSG Union                     36568002         4420545     12.09
Plane                        895116384       277640898     31.02
Sphere                      1005040013       582229587     57.93
Torus                         18713093         1553142      8.30
Torus Bound                   18713093         1757117      9.39
Bounding Object              501905861       210182269     41.88
Bounding Box                1225491255       586115615     47.83
Light Buffer                9583463456      4533066938     47.30
Vista Buffer                  17703138        12501206     70.62
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roots tested:              1757117   eliminated:              944496
Calls to Noise:          208705770   Calls to DNoise:      192728686
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Media Intervals:           1058235   Media Samples:          1058235 (1.00)
Shadow Ray Tests:        372564304   Succeeded:            169558684
Reflected Rays:             373693   Total Internal:           37250
Refracted Rays:             319341
Transmitted Rays:           428523
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smallest Alloc:                 26 bytes   Largest:            59152
Peak memory used:        111605592 bytes
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time For Parse:    0 hours  6 minutes  58.0 seconds (418 seconds)
Time For Trace:   12 hours 19 minutes  12.0 seconds (44352 seconds)
    Total Time:   12 hours 26 minutes  10.0 seconds (44770 seconds)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above story is entirely fictitious.

As of October 21st I will have left for a mission for my church (the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).  I will be serving in the Chile,
Santiago East mission for a period of 24 months.  If, for any reason, you
need to contact me, my Mother may be reached at chambersjec@juno.com, or
possibly at judycham@jps.net.  Remember, these e-mail addresses are
for my Mother, so please no frivolous emails.  I will not have email during
the period of my mission.

...Chambers, Benjamin David.
Ray->Shape Intersection          Tests       Succeeded  Percentage


