TITLE: eSoup - The improbable beginnings of electronic lifeforms
NAME: Daniel van Niekerk
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: daniel@osi.co.za
WEBPAGE: Not at present
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: esoup.jpg
ZIPFILE: esoup.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray v3.1a for windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray for main modeling and composition.
            Flatbed scanner for circuit image
            Photoimpact SE for editing texture image
            My own small utility, "splinegen", to generate splines...

RENDER TIME: 
    2 Hours 47 Minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 2, 233 MHz, also 2* slower pentiums to model
         while the faster one renders.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A sudden alteration of the gravitational constant
causes my parts cabinet to yield it's contents in the most divulging
way..(Well, that's my explanation of why full containers always topple
anyway). 
This happens often in the lab.  What is interesting,  however, is 
that this time the random fall of the components have caused a complex
electronic circuit to be implemented.  This circuit has enough 
"sentience" to send a message - the <Hello world> most new 
programmers stutter.

Unbelievable, isn't it?  

Yet many believe we humans all originated from a similar random event,
only that time it was say 1000000 times less probable...

There's more : Two tuning forks happend to be resting on top of the
case.  They voluntarily jumped into my Lemon and ginger juice.
That having a pH of about 2.3 and one being copper and the other iron
causes an electrolytic cell to be formed.  This supplies enough power,
unbelievably,
to drive the LCD.  The current is transmitted to the LCD by the
heatsink and the graphite in the pencil sketch laying under it. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Me enjoying it, mostly! The idea was generated by a brainstorming 
session : unbelievable can be interpreted as a Zillion paperclips 
falling into the shape of Bugs Bunny (Registered Trademark I guess)... 
The individual objects were modeled in
Moray and then combined into the final scene.

The splines were a major headache, as I wanted to do it through Moray.
I wrote a simple spliner utility that took a datafile containing control 
vertices and produced a spline in a povray file.
The spline consisted of connected spheres and cylinders.
I positioned the control points by manually dragging a sphere in Moray
and typing the coordinates sucessively into my datafile.
The povfile was then run through pov2mdl and merged to the scene
in Moray.  I started on a spline plugin for Moray, don't know how
useful that will be.

The other objects are csg's , roundedboxes (Moray plugin) and 
Rotational sweeps.  The heatsink is a translational sweep
(I love snap sometimes)
Interesting how easy the resistorbands are simulated
by a simple gradient colormap.  Likewise the capacitors are easily
textured by using a radial colormap.
I played with the lighting and the transparency of the blue racks.


