EMAIL: AvataR@GMX.Net
NAME: Garvin Hicking
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: 'Bunny ahead'
COUNTRY: Germany [Remagen]
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/HickingGarvin/
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02.watcom and Povray 3.02.unix
TOOLS USED:
        sPatch (Ears, Zylinder),
        Dos-BLOB (for the smoke above the fire)
        Paintshop (imagemaps for the tablecloth, the papers of the books and
        the cards)
        DOS-Editor (inserting Halos in source-code)
        Moray (everything else, imagemap for the wooden ground, Composition)

RENDER TIME: 22 days, mostly rendered on a Sparc4. To hold the deadline, the rest of the image was rendered on two P133s...
HARDWARE USED: iP133, 48MB RAM, 3,7GB Harddisk / Sun Sparc4
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I think my image is pretty self-explanatory. There's a bunch of books
in a shelf beyond. Some firey-columns to make a little magical/mysteric
atmosphere. On the table (with an old-fashioned tablecloth)you can see
a magical "stick" with some magic flowing out of it, some card for
a trick and a cylinder, where two ears of the standard-magic-bunny come
out. The scene is shortly before the magician starts his show...so stay
tuned :)

I chose this image/theme, because the first thing that came to my mind
concerning "magic" was this cylinder/bunny-trick and a magic-stick...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my first image for the contest. I tried to stick on normal
POVRay-primitives and I think I succeeded - there are no meshes at
all, only some image-maps. I arranged and created nearly everything
in moray, which sadly didn't support all of the features I wanted
to include on the image, like more halos and some atmospheric fog.

The ears from the rabbit are modified from the included sPatch-models,
they are more bigger and taller.

The fire was created with a cylindrical halo and some cones showing
off with a flame-map and a huge ambient-value. The smoke was created
using the DOS-Blob-Editor and a transmitting texture. After using
some focal blur, it IMHO seems very realistic. 

The tablecloth was by far the most interesting part. I used Bezier-
patches, which I hung over some spheres and edges from the table,
and this IMHO also looks realistic :)

What I did not succeed in was the shelf you can view beyond. The glass
did not come out realistic and didn't let much light out of it.
Don't know what I did wrong, maybe one can have a look at the
sources and tell me?

Any suggestions or comments about the image are highly appreciated,
because I want to take part in more IRT-Contests with maybe a
*REAL* realistic image...

I have included the whole source-code without image-maps. Those you
simply have to do by yourself, I think it should not be hard. The
following images were used:

BRETTER.TGA: The wooden ground.
HASE2.TGA  : The bunny-ear-"clothes" (used also as bump-map)
HERZ.TGA   : The Heart-Card
KARO.TGA   : The Caro-Card
KREUZ.TGA  : The Cross-Card
PIK.TGA    : The Pik-Card
SEITEN.TGA : The papers of the books (in the image, you can't see it...)
TISCH_B.TGA: The tablecloth-bumbmap

Many objects in the source-code (and as you may have noticed, the imagemaps
too) are referrenced by their german name. The source also is very
untidied, and not cleaned-up or commented. I mostly didn't put a name
on my objects...0:-)

Final Comment: The scene took extremely long to render. If I had more
               time, I would have definitely used Radiosity to improve
               lightning...but I'm sorry, 'til now my PC is too slow.