EMAIL: pollux@worldaccess.nl
NAME:  Ron A.F. Greve
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
WEBPAGE: http://www.worldaccess.nl/~pollux
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows 95
TOOLS USED: Temple on sprxtnqs
RENDER TIME: Forgot to check POV-ray's ouput but about 12 hours I believe.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 (64 MB) during creation, Pentium 150 for final rendering(s)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  Actually this is not a pov-ray render at all. It is
  a photo taken by some aliens of the planet "sprxtnqs".
  Since communicating in sprxtnqsan is not easy I can only guess that
  this must be the ruins of an ancient temple.
  They seem to have worshipped the glowing ball. Some important
  things in their lifes are on the pedestals:
   stylized grain,
   a photo of someone (looks somewhat familiar to me),
   games,
   fire,
   and a butterfly?

   Well anyway I fed the photo into my POV compression algorithm
   ( which compresses any photo into a small POVray-textfile.)

   And here it is.
   
   ( don't ask me about the compression program I have lost both code
     and executable :-) ).
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  I completely edited this scene by hand using the povray editor.
  No other tools were used. ( Except for a camera to take a picture of me :-) ).

  I used a lot of while loops to create for instance
    the floor,
    the wall,
    "Jack in the box" with a "real" spring.

  The preprocessor directives #if, #while are great to make some complex structures without
  the need for external tools.  
    
  The flame and the glowing gass of the ball are halos
  
  The green mountains are a julia fractal (three times).
  
  The shape of the halo and julia fractal is difficult to predict
  so I made them with a lot of trial and error. Usually I start with rendering an example from
  the povray help file then changing parameters until it suits what I had in mind.
  
  Note: There is some strange behaviour while rendereing the wall, sometimes it doesn't render completely
    (happens repeatedly on two different computers).
   Then after only saving the text file without changing anything the wall IS rendered. Well.., if that
   ain't MAGIC!... In any case if you would like to render this scene take in mind that the wall is
   higher then one stone.