EMAIL: Mark_Vanderbilt@msn.com
NAME: Mark D. Vanderbilt
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Imprisonment of Tinker Bell
COUNTRY: USA (Phoenix, AZ)
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/9870/index.html
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1
TOOLS USED: Texture Magic; Paint Shop Pro 4 (JPG conversion and text addition)
RENDER TIME: 8 hours 56 minutes (rendering in background)
HARDWARE USED: P-166 w/32mb RAM, NEC 3FGx monitor, Cirrus Logic video card & accelerator w/2mb onboard RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	Ah, magic.  What could be more fun than a tale from Never Land?
	"...and when Peter heard that it was Tinker's fault he sent her away for a week as punishment.
	Back at the pirate ship Captain Hook had the banished Tinker Bell brought to him.  He slyly offered to sail away with Wendy who, he understood, had come between the little fairy and Peter.  If Tinker would tell him how to find Peter's secret hiding place, where Wendy was living, Hook and the pirates would take the girl far away.  Jealous little Tinker was delighted.  She gave him the directions but added, 'You mustn't harm Peter!'  
	The pirate assured her, 'I won't lay a finger -- or a hook -- on Peter Pan.'  Then, lauching nastily he said, 'Thank you, my dear,' pushed Tinker Bell into a glass lantern, and shut it tight." 
	(from Walt Disney's _Treasury_of_Children's_Classics_, 1978)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
	(I would appreciate ANY comments you may have about this image.  Thank you!)
	I've followed the IRTC since its very beginning, but this is my first entry...
	The first important note is that this image is made entirely of standard POV objects using CSG.  This isn't an artistic statement on my part, however -- I simply have yet to find the time to learn how to use a modeller.
	Before I get into details, I'd like to say a special thanks to Jerry Anning & Jamis Buck for their assistance with the random/seed functions; and to Draugnar for helping me with a torus rotation problem.
	As with all of the objects in this scene, the lantern is a simple CSG.  The body of the lantern is basically a hollowed out box (the corners actually have a nice coving detail, but you can't see it.. poor planning on my part).  Hinges (again, not visible) and some locking rings were added to the "door" of the lantern as closely spaced cylinders.  The textures used are standard brass and chrome textures that come with the program.  To finish the body, I simply added thin panes of glass.
	The lantern's base is more complex.  Beginning with a cone at the base of the body, the rounded detail of the remaining base was created using torii, which proved slightly more complex than I had expected.  I chose a rosewood texture for the base (again, standard texture), aligning it with the y-axis to give a "turned" look.  Specular highlights and mild reflection was added to give the effect of a polished finish.  A brass baseplate completes the base.
	The lantern's top is similar to the base.  The torus "handle" gave me problems with positioning, but thanks to Draugnar's suggestions, I managed to get it where I wanted it.
	Oh.. the lock; again, simple CSG.  It's a bit hard to see, but there IS space for a key!
	Ah... the hook!  That was fun.  Again, however, it's just some clever (?) CSG; clipped torus, cone, some cylinders and spheres.  The only thing really "special" about this object is that the base of the hook (the light torus) uses the "Jellyfish" texture that came with Texture Magic.  I used this texture in an attempt to simulate a furry/ruffled base.  The results are so-so as far as the initial intent, but I'm pleased with the final result.
	The clock -- again, standard CSG.  Used the Times New Roman TrueType font for the numbers.  I used "dents" on the outer torus; I like the result, but I had intended it to be more of a battered look... it seems to me to be a bit "blobish".  By the way, for anyone who happened to take note of the "time", I completed the final verison of the .pov file at 4:58, so that's what I decided to put on the clock.
	Now... my concept of Tinker Bell may be a bit off of the norm, so here goes: I wanted to render the little fairy as a collection of many (50-100) small "looks_like" light sources; after all, fairy dust is visible, right?  This is where Jerry and Jamis came to the rescue, providing me with some starting points for using the random and while/end loops to generate Tinker without having to manually place 100 light sources (which I especially like because I don't believe that humans can be truly random).  While the light given off by Tinker is WHITE, she shows up as a golden-yellow; it just seemed more "fairyish" to me.
	The desk and walls use the "teak" map that came with the POV program.  I figured that we were aboard Hook's ship, and since real sailing ships used teak... 
	The biggest problem that I encountered was that placing 50-100 light sources in such a small area (a 1-3-1 ellipsoid) severely washed out the rest of the image.  For example, the clock and hook were, for all practical purposes, large white blobs.  The teak walls and desk became very orange.  I was stumped for a while on how to fix this.  I initially attempted to compensate by reducing the amount of light transmitted through the glass, but it just didn't work.  What I settled on was a heavy dosage of "brilliance" to the scene objects.  An ambient of 0.2 was then added, and I used extremely tight specular highlights.  
	I am fairly pleased with the result, though I had wanted to incorporate my name/email address into the image instead of tagging it on afterwards, but I didn't have the time (nor could I figure out a decent place to put it).
	No post-processing gamma correction or brightness/contrast correction was done to this image.