TITLE: Transistor
NAME: John
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jhu@sdf.lonestar.org
TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: transist.jpg
ZIPFILE: transist.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray 3.5, gimp for image reconstitution and jpeg conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 800, Pentium 4 1.5

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The transistor is the foundation of modern computing, so I thought I'd pay
tribute to it with this submission. This specific image is of a point-contact
transistor. The point contact transistor was invented at Bell Labs in the mid
1950s. The inventors William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain won
the 1956 Nobel prize in physics for this invention. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This was quite a task. The entire image is full of CSG and a couple isosurfaces.
The copper base is four separate isosurfaces with a brushed-copper metal
textures applied to it. The wires are all toruses. Those were really difficult
to get right as their positioning depends on a lot of rotations that just get
confusing. 

The room was created in a fraction of the time it took to just get the wiring of
the transistor correct. It's just a CSG of boxes. The chair isn't really a
chair at all. Finally, there's a fuzzy picture of Shockly, Bardeen, and
Brattain in the background.

