TITLE: An attractive view
NAME: Teemu Tommola
COUNTRY: Finland
EMAIL: teemu.tommola@siba.fi
TOPIC: Forces of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ttview.jpg
ZIPFILE: ttview.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows v3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    TOOLS USED Moray for Windows v3.5 (some modelling), ViziMag 3.1
(computing the magnetic field), Paint (imagemaps)

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hrs 3 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.41 GHz Pentium 4, 192 MB of RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The Solenoid Valley - the most magnetic attraction in the Land of Compasshead
Robots!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started with an idea of showing iron filings lined up in a magnetic field.

The first scene I sketched showed a corner of a simple room and a table with a
sheet of paper and two magnets placed on it, and iron filings scattered all
over. I also spent some time modelling a plastic tube filled with iron
filings.

The scene as a whole was very unimaginative, though. We have seen dozens of such
"laboratory pictures" in this competition. But the main problem was that you
had to get the camera so near the magnets (to see the magnetic field pattern)
that it was impossible to get the background right. That led me to make the
magnets real huge...

I used a shareware program called ViziMag to compute the magnetic field. The
filings are positioned simply in straight lines (100 X 100) with a random
rotation in proportion to flux density (and a slight random offset to hide the
matrix). In other words: the bigger the magnetic force, the stricter is the
positioning along the field lines.

I had previously modelled the robots in Moray but I did some redesign in POV
during the process. Virtually everything else was made in POV. The solenoid and
its cables are made with splines. The hills are two heightfields, one with
bumps (for foreground) and a smooth one for the background. The cloud is a
(flattened) sphere with turbulent media. Media is also used to make the
spotlight and the heads of the robots more visible.

There are two point lights in the middle of the valley. I was trying out area
lights to get a feeling that the light is coming from nowhere but I ran out of
time. Each robot has a spotlight attached to its front lid, a point light
inside of its "stomach" and two point lights inside of its head. I used
radiosity, with quite minimal effects.


