EMAIL: jan.pilgenroeder@post.rwth-aachen.de
NAME: Jan Pilgenroeder
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dear Bob, do not drink that stuff...
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray Unofficial 3.1e
TOOLS USED: GraficConverter
RENDER TIME: 47 hours, 36 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Umax Pulsar G3 250 MHz, Agfa SnapScan 300, Ballpen and Paper.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Obviously, Bob ignored my well meant warning and opened a silver bottle filled with a strange substance (might this indeed be Apsion - a substance, described in a song by Swim Two Birds, that was designed to find the answer to everything but poses a serious threat, because it defies gravity, penetrates other substances and turns them into Apsion also?)
This is btw my first submission to the IRTC.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Glass and Bottle are just some solid geometry, the stream of liquid was done with the spline patch that is built into Pov-Ray Unofficial.
The Letter to Bob was done with ballpen and paper and scanned in.
Unfortunately there is a glitch I did not see when I first rendered the Image without area lights. A big drop of liquid benetrates the Glass at the right rear side (it blended with the hard shadows of the liquid itself but was quite visible 2 days of continuous rendering later with soft shadows).
Although I had not planned (at least not conciously) to let this substance penetrate the glass, it works ok with the description of Apsion in that song from Swim Two Birds. So, this green stuff is obviously Apsion and Bob is in some real trouble (and so are actually all of us if Bob does not find a way to contain it). But now enough of explainig away some stupid error into a close to mystical revelation :-)
The structure of the glass (there is quite some ray-bouncing inside the walls of the glass, especially at the rim and at the side where the ray enters almost parrallel to the wall) forced me to set max_trace_level to 60, which also made the liquid (a blob with 50k spherical elements along a spline path and translated by increasing random vectors along this path) quite slow to render.
The trace level along with the area-light and some anti-aliasing really made this slow to render.
But apart from the render time this picture was done quite quickly. The most time consuming and difficult part was to find the spline path for the liquid.