TITLE: Force of gravity
NAME: Malte Marwedel
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: m.marwedel@onlinehome.de
WEBPAGE: Have one, but neither in English nor about raytracing
TOPIC: Forces of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mm_gravi.jpg
ZIPFILE: mm_gravi.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.0

TOOLS USED: 

  Virtual Tools, direct: KPovModeler, GIMP, OpenOffice, KSnapshot, One
Self-written-program,
  Virtual Tools, indirect: WINE, KWrite, KDE, Mozilla, Linux, Delphi, Windows95
  Real Tools: My brain, ruler, pocket calculator, sheet of paper, PC (of
course)

RENDER TIME: 
    approximate 38 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1800+ with 512MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  In my view forces of nature can be found everywhere, since we would not exist
without them.
  My image is primary about the force of gravity but there are other forces as
well.
  Imagine a scientist who had received a fax from a workmate (at random his name
is Newton) that an unknown star had been found (perhaps a nearly impossible to
see brown dwarf) which will pass relatively close to the planet in some
decades. The founding made it into their local newspaper. After some weeks his
workmate has the exact orbital path data of the newfound star. His calculations
show that the gravity of the star will alter the orbit of their planet and moon
so strong, that in fact they will crash into their sun one day. So he send the
scientist a second fax with the orbital data in the hope his simulation were
wrong, and his workmate gets to a better result. Well, you see the the result
of the calculation on the monitor.
  So the gravity was responsible to form the stars, planets and moons.  
  The gravity is responsible (together with the conservation of momentum) to
hold the planet on stable distance to the sun so that life can be envelop (an
other type of natural force).
  And the gravity will be responsible that the planet will crash into the sun.
  
  Forces in my image:
  The Apple: Without gravity he would had not fallen from the tree, remember
Isaac Newton.
  The Picture on the wall: The gravity holds the gas planet together and with
the force of momentum the rings around the planet were formed. (The spacecraft
Cassini made an amazing photo some weeks ago which shows that the gravity of a
moon of Saturn produces waves in some rings.)
  The dart board: Without gravity someone would need to throw the darts directly
and not in a parable to hit the middle.
  The toy on the left: Without gravity the spheres would not swing back, thus
the toy would not work.
  The paperflyer: Without gravity he would not fly this way, moreover there
would no atmosphere to fly in.
  The table: Without gravity everything would fly free though the room but
gravity alone would not be good, friction is needed otherwise everything would
slip slowly from the table. In microgravity perhaps the things could be hold on
the table with glue, as used by (see below)
  The notes: They don't need gravity to hold together, they're using an other
force of nature - adhesion.
  The Window: Thanks to the sun it is bright outside. Without gravity the
hydrogen would had not been compressed and so no fission process would have
started to produce light, head and every other elements than hydrogen and
helium. Moreover the water would not be below the air.
  
      

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

  The whole scene consists primary of boxes, spheres, cylinders text elements
and torus.
  This is my first "real" image and the first one where I used objects other
than boxes and spheres, moreover
  it's the first time I tried to modify/create textures myself.
  I needed 13 days until I had every objects I primary tought of in my scene.
After that I did some fine tuning.

  How did I made the individual objects:
  The letters: The letters were written in OpenOffice and then exported as PDF.
The the PDF were opened with GIMP and exported as PNG. Those PNG were then used
as image_map. I'm not very lucky about the readability of the letters, but I
don't think making the image larger than 1600x1200 for better readability would
be a good solution.
  The monitor: The monitor based mainly on boxes. To make the monitor shine
bright I placed a spotlight outside of the picture which shines on the monitor.
Some boxes behind the camera limit the light so that only the content of the
screen is be brightened. Three text fields and a torus are used for labelling.
Two spheres and a light source for the LED.
  The content of the monitor: I wrote a program which can simulate the
interaction between masses two years ago. I don't think the program is
physically correct (it is only 2D) but in my view the results look realistic.
For this image, I improved the old program a little bit, since all paths of the
objects had the same color before. I made a screenshot of the program and added
the collision warning with GIMP (since my program does not recognise
collisions). Then the screenshot was included as an image_map.
  The mice: The mice is made of two surface of revolution, some torus, some
triangles, and boxes.
  The mousepad: The Mousepad were made with two super-ellipsoides.
  The keyboard: The keyboard is a box. The keys are a lot of boxes, generated
with loops. The holes for LEDs are cylinders.
  The paperflyer: The paperflyer consists of triangles and two invisible boxes.
  The lamp on the table: The lamp is made with spheres, cylinders, a plane light
and ... some boxes.
  The toy: A box, lot of spheres and cylinders.
  The paperblock: A box with a text element.
  The pencil: Three cylinders and two cones.
  The apple: A torus and two cylinders.
  The darts: One lathe with some triangles for the wings.
  The dart board: Some triangles together with cylinders and torus.
  The seals for the window: Are made of boxes and cylinders.
  The picture on the wall: Some spheres, three torus for the rings boxes of
course, cylinders and two text elements. The picture is placed into the wall to
create a small 3D effect.
  Everything else: Boxes (and some light sources).
  
  What I would like to be better: The keyboard looks ugly and the wooden table
could be better as well. Moreover some wires of the toy are not fully visible
(seem to be too thin). The heater looks a little bit simple.
  First I planned to make an entry for the IRTC Animation Competition as well,
since the crash of the planet into the sun would have fit to the current topic
"Explosion" but I neither have the time, nor the experience.
  
  Rendering: I started with the best quality and for some reason I needed
13hours to render the image. After that I reduced the quality (Render settings
and area lights). But it seems like I only had much too much area lights so I
used only some area lights, best render settings with recursive anti-aliasing
and diffuse reflections in the end.
  Post processing: The rendered PNG file was opened with GIMP and then saved as
JPG file with a comment added to the the image information. I tried to use all
of the allowed 250KB, unfortunately you still see bad artifacts (the PNG file
has a size of 1,4MB).
SOURCECODE:
  The sourcecode contains the keyboard, the mice and the paperflyer only. As
long as you mention me in the credits, feel free to use and improve them.
  
CREDITS:
  The Textures: Most textures were modified textures from KPovModeler included
in kpovmodeler/examples/includes/inlined - the comments say they are from
POV-Ray 3.1. For me they seem equal to those from POV-Ray 3.6 in the in the
povray/include directory. Some textures are still the original ones and few are
fully selfmade.
  The "Special: Off-Topic" logo on the mousepad:  Thanks to Zorglub for the
permission to use the logo.
  Fonts for the letters: The free fonts from
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freefont were used.
  Other fonts: For every text beside the letters and the screenshot, the font
"cyrvetic.ttf" from POV-Ray is used.
  
Oh, and sorry for my bad English. I hope I translated all those technical words
correctly into English with the help of Wikipedia and http://dict.leo.org/. But
I worry I have translated some words wrong.
*END OF FILE*

