TITLE: Mmmmm, beer.....
NAME: Henry Bush
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: henry@unforgettable.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~hjsb196/
TOPIC: Dreams
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mmmbeer.jpg
ZIPFILE: mmmbeer.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5 RC6 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 
    Moray (mmm never really used it before, now not sure if i
can manage
         without registering it... but i don't have any money!)
         Paint Shop Pro 4 for JPG conversion, grab of simpsons still, creation  
of posters at back.


RENDER TIME: 
    Parse 07s
         Photons: 46m 00s
         Render:  24h 38m 58s


HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 650 running at 682MHz, 512Mb, Windows XP with 3Gb swapfile
(peak memory usage was about 400Mb I think)
        

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The late day sun shining through a freshly poured pint of beer, while watching
the simpsons. *This* is the stuff that dreams are made of.

I saw this scene in our student union bar, and just knew that it would make a
good entry. I think I've done the original justice, but my recreation is far
from perfect.

I acknowledge that the Simpsons image is and forever remains the property of
that wonderful person, Matt Goering.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I don't think there's anything particularly complicated.

Everything apart from the froth and some final tweaking was done in Moray.

The froth was made by placing 30000 bubbles randomly (with some restraints) on
the surface of both the beer and glass. For the first time, I couldn't be arsed
to wait for it to randomise these every time, so I got it to write them to a
file.

The sun is an area light source which shoots photons at the beer glass and only
that (simplifies matters). The glass and the beer are lathes, outside there are
two heightfields as grass, everything else is simple primitives.

The wood texture was taken from one of the default moray ones and edited (a
lot!). I quite like the result.

Surprising as it may seem, the thing that it took me longest to get right was
the caustic created by the photons. I spent ages (well, probs about 12 hours in
total) fiddling with all the parameters, changing the material properties of
the glass and the beer, adjusting the photon source, etc, only to find that the
(almost) default parameters of the global settings gave the best result. Well,
that's raytracing for you i guess.

My housemate Pete insisted a light such as the one on the wall at the back
wouldn't produce a pool of light like I had on the ceiling (and he's a trained
physics teacher). We debated, I changed some parameters of it, and eventually
he gave in (but only after we had got a table lamp and pointed it at the
ceiling!).

So let that be a lesson to you, Pete: Povray is always right.

