TITLE: Psalm 119 105
NAME: Nathan Kopp
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: nk80300@ltu.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.grfn.org/~nkopp/pov/gallery.html
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ps119105.jpg
ZIPFILE: ps119105.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02 for Windows with IsoSurface patch

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.0, sPatch, PaintShop Pro, Povwin editor

RENDER TIME: 
    ???

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
Psalms 119:105

Most of my images in the past, despite conveying emotion through
artistic pathways, have been quite 'realistic.'  Part of my motivation
behind this image was to add some symbolism to a raytrace.

For those without a Christian background:  Just as we use candles,
lanterns, and flashlights to light our physical world, so the Bible
(God's word) illuminates the spiritual realms and provides direction to
souls trapped in the darkness.

I hope that by bringing religion into my ray-tracing I don't offend
anyone.  But Christianity and ray-tracing play such large roles in my
life that the crossover was inevitable.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image was created almost entirely in Moray 3.0.  One feature that
Moray still lacks, however, is the ability to set color values above 1.0
(which is necessary to create realistic flame-halos).

The textures are mostly derived from textures in the Moray texture
libraries with a bit (or a lot, in some cases) of tweaking to each one.

The candle holder and candles were created in sPatch and textured in
Moray.  There are a LOT of patches in the candle holder, and thus it
takes a very long time to parse, but not much time to render.  There are
small point lights inside the candles (as well as inside the flames) to
make them glow in a realistic way.  I also added emitting halos around
the flames to create fake atmospheric interaction.

The flashlight was done entirely in Moray.  It's made mostly of more
bezier patches.  Although it looks like the light is shining from inside
the flashlight, the light source is actually outside pointing the
opposite direction.  Doing it that way greatly decreased the trace time.

The lantern consists of mostly sweeps and cylinders.  Bezier patches make
up the rails and the handle.  The flame is another halo with more faked
atmosphere interaction.  The lantern is my favorite object in the scene.
I found a picture of a brass lantern on the internet that it is modeled
after.

The Bible is created out of two translational sweeps (prisms) for the
pages, a few Bezier patches for the cover and ribbon, and more patches
for the top few pages.  The texture for the side of the pages is a
gradient pattern with warps to push pattern and make the lines (at least
kind of) conform to the shape of the image.  The words on the top few
pages are mapped on via "map_type 8" in the Isosurface patch.  This is a
map_type which I created that allows the image to follow the U/V
coordinates of the bezier (i.e. when you stretch the bezier, the image
stretches with it).  The use of "map_type 8" is quite limited (it must
be applied directly to the patch, not to an object that has a patch in
it), but it's easy to work around the limitations.

The light shining down from above really does interact with the
atmosphere, as does the cylindrical light coming from (well, actually
it's pointing at) the flashlight.  I found that these constrained light
sources don't really slow down the render, but I had to turn the
atmosphere off for all of my point-sources because it was just too slow.

The IsoSurface version of Povray is available at:
http://www.public.usit.net/rsuzuki/e/povray/iso/index.html