TITLE: E-Absence
NAME: Aitzol Muelas Cortabarria
COUNTRY: Spain
EMAIL: aitzolmuelas@gmail.com
WEBPAGE: aitzolmuelas.blogspot.com
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: eabsence.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    gimp 2.2, Microsoft Word

RENDER TIME: 
    52h 24min

HARDWARE USED: 
    pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The first idea was to have a book with no text, but i found it too simple. So I
bumped into this short novel, "Gadsby", written by Ernest Vincent Wright in
1939, if I am not mistaken, which is over 50 thousand words long and does not
use a single letter E in the whole text: thus the title E-Absence, the absence
of the letter E. Then I added the lamp to put an interesting light source, and
a magnifying glass so that at least part of the text was readable at the
image's resolution, so that you can see there are no Es in it (you can check
the original text online to be sure, if you want ^_^). The full novel is
available for free online at http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/index.html

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Well, to start off, the pages of the book are bicubic patches (loop of 12 double
pages) and the texture uses a warped pyramid function to create the rigged
edges. The text is layered on top. The covers of the book are simple CSG
shapes, with a crackle pigment.
The oil lamp is a cut off blob, with crackled normal to make cute caustics ^_^,
although I had to turn refraction photons off in it because it caused too many
ugly highligts. The silver base is made of cutaway SOR (although not too
visible you can see the shadows cast by it), and the flame, which was one of
the tricky bits, uses a function I defined to simulate the ignition of a flame,
which takes place (max combustion, max light) at a certain distance from
origin. The media has two parts (two media in the container) one for the
yellowish (scaled in the y direction), one for the blueish. There was no need
to add turbulence to the flame to make it look more "natural", since the
distortion created by the cracled glass was enough.
And finally, the magnifyer: simple shapes, although it took a while to adjust
focal length, and therefore radii of the lens, and also position and rotation
so that at least part of text could be read through the lens.
The base of the magnifying glass, as well as the table, use default textures
from woods.inc, with default finish, so they don't look very nice, but I didn't
have too much spare time to work on it (next time maybe).

