EMAIL: joost.egelie@skynet.be
NAME: Joost Egelie
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: je_magic.jpg
COUNTRY: Belgium
WEBPAGE: Working on it. When uploaded, should be http://www.skynet.be/users/81504/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray version 3.02a.f1 [.MacCodeWarrior]
TOOLS USED: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 19hrs 40min 56sec +/- 30min
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh Performa 6200/12MB(24 with VM) running Motorola speed604.lib on a PPC603@75MHz chip
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Behold the future in my magic crystal ball... And hence, it's the new POV-Ray 4.0 Tracer! With again a shipload of magical features, of which few are yet supported by any raytracer... Yea, this will be the Chosen Tracer which will defeat all other raytracers...", said the Magician.
The future within a crystal ball, glowing in the moonlit room with silk curtains on the walls. The sudden sigh that escaped my throat blew out the candle which withheld evil spirits from the Tarot cards. The Hermits face on the card predicted a devastating change in the Virtual World, therefor I moved the candle so I wouldn't have to see it. Cold shivers tickeled my spine as I lay my eyes on the dusty cover of the Magicians Handbook: "Ye Olde Persistence Of Vision Handbook Of 3D Magics"...
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used mans most expensive tool there is: Time... To get the halos perfect, the atmosphere straight, the lights interacting properly... Weeks went over it. And suddenly I realized the deadline was creeping nearby, hour by hour. I was afraid I wouldn't have it rendered in time, since a 160x90 preview took an hour to render. But the main 800x450 (which is 16:9 aspect ratio, a new standard) rendered amazingly fast, since it would take about 27 hours according to my rough calculations: 2 powered by (800 divided by 160) times the rendering time of a 160x90 image. I guess the radiosity doesn't follow this estimation.
Furtheron I used Adobe Illustrator to create the childish wallcurtain pattern and the magical bookcover, but I could have used any vector image program. I tend to use Illustrator since I'm well accustomed to it from out my job (prepresser). The same goes up for Adobe Photoshop, which I only used to convert the vector images to gif files and to crop size the three card images.
Another note: the little pictures of the zodiac and their symbolic representatives are all from the font "Zeal". It's the first time I find a goal to use this font.
The three card images come from the Internet, from the sources below:

The Salem Tarot Page: Guide To Witchcraft, Salem, and Tarot.
http://www.salemtarot.com/

Astrology, Tarot & Jung / Home Page of Anthony Louis (mailto:tonylouis@aol.com)
http://members.aol.com/tonylouis/home/index.html

I would like to thank the people responsible for these websites, for providing the pictures while publishing it on the freely accessible Internet. Anthony Louis is the writer of a Tarot book, presenting it on his website. The Salem Tarot Page is a most remarkably well constructed webpage and very pleasant to check out.

If you take a look at the je_magic.pov code, you'll notice I wrote it in an explanatory way, so you can muddle around in it. I've used the POV-Ray 3.0 new declaration and testing directives to create switches which you can use to take other camera positions, adjust image quality, or to switch on and off time consuming effects. The last part helped me a lot while creating and "debugging" objects, textures and effects. In addition, I added parser text outputs, so you can see what's going on while the parser is reading the scene file.

Final note: I took the effort to make a just-blown-out candle, because since POV-Ray 3.0 is out, everyone is using halos to make a little candle flame. This proves that you can use halos to make other funny effects, too.

Now tamper around and have fun!

BTW.: I couldn't  include the OXFORD.TTF font, due to copyright issues concerning fonts. And being a prepresser I'm well aware of these things.

JOOST EGELIE
joost.egelie@skynet.be

"'Virtual Reality'. This is a contradictio in terminis, since it really exists in our Universe. We should rather use the term 'Real Virtuality'. And due to the devine character its given by the millions of Internet users, we shall speak in future of 'Ritual Vealtea'. Should this not be sufficient, call it 'Really Vacuous'. Then it's a term to indicate a big void, in which imaginative things can happen... Hey! That is a Virtual Reality!"
Me.