TITLE: Paperweight.
NAME: Robert Arthur
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: rea@st-and.ac.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www-hons-cs.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~rea
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: paperrea.jpg
ZIPFILE: paperrea.zip
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for DOS
TOOLS USED: Moray 2.5 (unregistered as yet :( ) and Paint Shop Pro.
RENDER TIME: Unsure - long (>24 hours)
HARDWARE USED: P60
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A glass paperweight on a burning piece of paper

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image was designed not to be a great task in modelling, but more an
excersise in lighting and colour design.   As such, it contains very few
objects.   I call it an `excersise in photorealistic surreality', but I
was always a bit like that.

The paperweight is simply a y-axis hyperboloid (one of the most useful
objects in the universe - should be a primitive...), capped off with planes
and some cones.   This was given a slightly brown tint, though other than
that it is a basic glass texture.

The floor was given a bozo pigment with varying greens, and a crackle
normal, using a slope_map to get the flat center.   Slight reflection was
probably unecessary, but by the time the test render came out, it looked
OK, and I didn't have time (or electricity) to warrent re-rendering.

The Paper is a bezier patch, modelled in Moray, and given an image map for
the text.   I then applied an onion texture to get the blackened corner, as
I was not sure I could persuade the image map to behave near the curl.
Again, I may have done this differently given more time to render.
The flame is a very simple halo effect.   I decided that to make it bigger
or more turbulent would probably skew the point of attention too far, so I
caught it just before it `flared'.

Finally, lighting, and in order to prevent harsh shadows causing a visual
distraction, I used an area_light for the spotlight.   The only other
light source in the scene is the flame, which would have looked odd without
casting some light, though I did not want the effect too pronounced, so I
gave it a fairly strict fall_off.   All lights have a slight yellowish
tint, so as to look indoors.   I am not sure how the Gamma will look on other
machines, since I was in a bit of a hurry to submit.   The unlit areas of
floor should be `just' visible.   I promise to look into this in the future ;)

Any further questions, please feel free to e-mail me at the above address.

Bob.

