TITLE: Ruined experiment
NAME: Jaime Vives Piqueres
COUNTRY: Valencia, Spain
EMAIL: jaime@ctav.es
WEBPAGE: http://www.ctav.es/jaime
TOPIC: LABORATORY
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ruined.jpg
ZIPFILE: ruined.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    UniMegaPOV 0.5a, compiled by Mark Gordon.

TOOLS USED: 

- Red Hat Linux 6.2
- KDE 1.1.2 ((C) KDE Team), as window manager.
- Kwrite ((C) Jochen Wilhelmy), to write POV scripts.
- The Gimp ((C) S.Kimball and P.Mattis), to convert PNG to JPG and for
  hf editing.

RENDER TIME: 
    9h 15m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel P-III 667Mhz, mounted on Intel CC820, with 128MB RAM.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Ruined experiment (in a boring lab with internet access).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  Altought this round topic was very promissing, I've not found a good idea
for an interesting scene. Being a bit worried, I started to create typical 
lab stuff, extracting shapes from old chemistry books and some magazines. 
When I had enough stuff, I started to make the room and fornitures, all with
classic lab materials. In some weeks, I had a nice but completely boring lab. 
I left the scene to mature for some days, but nothing special happend in my 
mind. But, in a last-minute half-illumination, I've conceived the idea of an
experiment ruined due to the internet addiction of a chemistry student (my
excuses to all the chemistry students reading this, and not only for the easy
joke, but also for the wrong details on the lab and stuff).

  Finally, I have done many renders to tweak composition, lighting and
radiosity. As the final image was very dark, I added global photons to the
scene, but only for reflective caustics, bcos the refractive ones looked too
bright and produced strange big spots (I must first learn more on photons
before using them...). Then I tried classic faked caustics, but they looked 
poorly, and I prefered to not have caustics at all.

  Thechnically, all in the scene is done with classic methods. The only part
where I experimented a bit is the smoke. It consists on a stack of spheres
with increasing radius, and using two medias in each container, one  for
emision and another absoption, slighty and progresively changing some
parameters. Thanks to Johannes Ewers for the inspiration provided by his nice
explosion on the winner "lake.jpg". In his honour I added some particles and
the traces of them with fading medias and conected cyliders.

  Another nice trick is in the computer screen: the image (a page from the
great IRTC CD) is a media image_map! I never figured this was possible... I
tought on it searching a way to have self-lighted image_maps when ambient
light is set to 0. 

  Finally, I must notice that the code zipped doest not render the exact same
scene I sent. At some moment I started to become bored and ruined a bit some
things. Perhaps some of you know this strange syndrome? ;)

  Well, waiting for next topic... bye!


  Jaime Vives Piqueres
  Valencia, Oct. 2000.


