TITLE: Mirari
EMAIL: Simon.Marsh@prnet.co.uk
NAME: Simon Marsh
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
COUNTRY: England
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 (Linux Version)
TOOLS USED: xv, emacs
RENDER TIME: 30 hrs
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2 66 + 16meg RAM, P166 + 128meg RAM for final render.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This scene is about lighting, and the way that it interacts with the glass
objects in the room. 

Marvel at how the mirror really does reflect the light of the spotlight 
(look at the delicate shadows on the table and the floor). Gasp at the
plant through the glasses (even through the stem of the each glass) and 
see how the light shines through the objects on the table to create effects 
on the wall. Note how the shadows of the glasses and bottle are green.
Wonder at the many other light effects, reflections and transparencies in
the scene.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my first IRTC sumbission, and my aim was to create something with 
quality and believable lighting, something which often seems lacking in 
entries that I've previously looked at. Whether I've managed that is something
for you to judge.

All the objects in the scene were entirely hand crafted and arranged on my 
trusty 486 at home. The result was then rendered over a couple of days 
using the spare cycles on our P166 webserver. 

The plant at the back is the most complex object, each stalk off the main
stem has 5 leaves on. Each leaf is another smaller stalk with a bezier patch
(manually crafted !) on the end. These are then arranged randomly using a 
while loop. The whole plant object takes up 16meg of memory during rendering.
(Which made my disk make strange noises as povray swapped in and out on
my poor 486).

The glasses and bottle are lathe objects and really are hollow, you can
see this at the top of the glasses and in the opening of the bottle.

Almost every object in the scene exhibits some kind of reflective or 
transparent property which is why the render took so long. Even the