TITLE: Timeless Alchemy
NAME: Marjorie Graterol
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: emediez@emediez.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.emediez.com
TOPIC: Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mg_lab.jpg
ZIPFILE: mg_lab.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g


TOOLS USED: 


//Modelers
 
****sPatch**** 
Copyright 1996-1998 by Mike Clifton.

****AC3D*****
Copyright 1999 by Andy Colebourne

****Corel Draw 8.0 *******
- dingbat/ character manipulation. 

****Corel Photopaint 8.0 *******
- compression, signature and digimarc id. 

//Reference

******Books******
How was it done. The story of Human Ingenuity through the Ages. 
Feats of Science, section. The Reader's Digest Association, USA, 1998.

****Internet*****

http://www.about.com  
About > Science > Chemistry

http://www.crystalinks.com/physmet.html
Alchemy and Metaphysics

http://planeta.clix.pt/petrinus/
Alchemy

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/home.html
Alchemy
(also .gif image for egyptian symbols for the metal)

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~mulley/Galileo/inventions/inventions5.html
Galileo's inventions






RENDER TIME: 

49m 01s
           

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Pentium III 500MHz, 96MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    
Laboratories began as a controlled place to demonstrate theories. This image
depicts what I think an early lab looked like. Dated somewhere in the Middle
Age, 
an Alchemy lab, or workshop, was devoted to find the philosophers' stone. A
complex procedure to transform ordinary materials into gold, intended to mimic
what they believed to be the processes within the earth's crust. However, this
goal was 
only the material aspect of a whole philosophy which involved also mental and
spiritual scopes. Alchemists used weird and wonderful laboratory "apparatus".
Only few of them are depicted, since there's no way to convey all those symbols
in a single scene.

Most objects have been created with sPatch, few with AC3D and some with POV-Ray
itself.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


1.- Scene
1.1. The building is a CSG object, centered and then rotated. Lobes are just
differences. The scene is in a kind of basement or room far from commom people.
   

1.2. There is a black background behind the building, and objects that are very
close to the camera are scaled to fit the scene.

1.3. Simple light_sources were used (three) in a palette setting, no media and
no fog. Lights rely on textures to give an ambience, due to the fact that the
ambient_light proved to be extremely intrusive.

 

2.- Objects

All objects are referenced in the source file, except these too large files:

esc3.inc // wood stairs //5,715 KB
mod5.inc //egyptian eye//1,550 KB
 
As possible, from front to rear and left to right.

2.1. Pelican Glass, Galileo's thermoscope, scale, mortar, stones and still in an
oven, modeled with sPatch. Exported as POV, whether it be using pig plugin, or
bicubic patch. 
2.2. Wood stairs and material holder modeled in sPatch, as well as the second
pelican glass barely seen behind the stairs. Dee's mirror is a simple sphere in
an sPatch object. 
2.3. The ornament in the wall (top right) is a composite of two different
dingbats characters. They were combined in Corel Draw8, exported as .dxf,
extruded and exported as .pov in AC3D. 
  
2.4. Symbols in the paper are, as objects, modeled in sPatch, as well as the
holder. As image, it is a .gif image from an alchemy site in the web. 
2.5. Containers are surfaces of revolution, scaled and translated differently to
fill some spaces. Stones were also modeled in sPatch. The fabric behinf the
stairs, sPatch modeled also.    
2.6. The small metallic fence is modeled in sPatch. The curtain is an object
imported from   SoftCad Lite library, textured in POV.
2.7. The table, sandglass -from my "unbelievable" topic entry- and chandelier,
are all sPatch objects.

3. Textures

1.1. All textures are procedural, except the image on the wall. Most textures
are coded in one of the two include main resources for the pov file. In those
files, and maybe in some objects individually, textures that belong to
povlab.inc are properly referenced.
        

 

 
    


