TITLE: Fiat Lux
NAME: Mark Wagner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Rengaw03/
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fiatlux.jpg
ZIPFILE: fiatlux.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 
    "Display" for converting to JPEG

RENDER TIME: 
    35 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    400Mhz AMD K6-II

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light": and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called
Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Genesis 1:1-5

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image is simply the result of passing white light through a triangular
prism.

Creating this image was a how-not-to for using photon mapping with dispersion. 
My first attempt had the gather radius and number of dispersion elements set
far too low, resulting in six distinct bands of color, one for each of the
elements of the spectrum.  My second try had the number of dispersion elements
set correctly, but the gather radius too high, resulting in a band of cyan, a
magenta band, and a yellow band, plus some white lines.  Several tries later, I
had the colors separated back out, but the banding was back, so I increased the
number of photons shot.  This, of course, brought the cyan/magenta/yellow
banding back.

After several cycles of this, with ever-increasing render times, I produced this
image.

