TITLE: A great (re)invention !
NAME: Thibaut Jonckheere
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: tuabihtucl@yahoo.fr
WEBPAGE: -

TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kitcomp.jpg
ZIPFILE: kitcomp.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    - ImageMagick to convert the image to jpeg, TheGimp to sign it.
            - The chairs in the background are from the povray object
collection
            (http://objects.povworld.org/), and are Copyright S.Crofts

 

RENDER TIME: 
    approx. 3 hours 45 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 2GHz, 512 Mo


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The picture shows a great (re)invention that anyone can do in
his/her
kitchen (as in the picture) - or elsewhere: the compass.  Just take a needle,
magnetize the tip, put it
through a piece of cork floating on water, and - it's magic! - the needle will
always orient
itself in the same direction (the North-South line), pushed by an "invisible
force"!

I think that the (true) invention of the compass is a great achievement: to make
the connection
between forces acting on some bizare materials found in nature, and the global
geography of earth
is quite subtle. And it has been since its invention extremely usefull
(navigation ,etc.).
So, to re-discover the compass with such a simple experiment is a very pleasant
thing to do.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I am new to PovRay and raytracing in
general (this
is my first IRTC entry), so I guess there is nothing specially involved in this
picture. 
The plate is a lathe object (in fact,the profile is just a tanh(x) curve), and
the colors 
are inspired by some plates I have at home.
The writing on the notebook is from a image map. The rest is just standard CSG
(the chairs are
Copyright S.Crofts, from the povray object collection). The light is coming
mainly from a window
at the right of the picture, with a nice warm sun (but there is also a light
bulb on the ceiling... have you noticed
 how often we keep light bulbs on when they are not really needed ?:-) .  
The long render-time of the picture (with respect to its simplicity) is mainly
due to focal blur.

PS: 1) as I am still a beginner with PovRay, all comments and advices are
specially welcome.
    2) the code given is a bit messy. If anyone is interested, I may clean it a
little bit


