EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de NAME: Norbert Kern TOPIC: Spirit of Asia COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: chado COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: not yet RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray v3.5 beta 9 icl.win32 TOOLS USED: Plantstudio, Photoshop RENDER TIME: ca. 24 h / ca. 490 MB peak memory HARDWARE USED: 1,4 GHz Athlon C / 1 GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: If I should say a single term which expresses "Spirit of Asia" best, I would take "spirituality". All today's world religions date from Asia for example. For my entry I chose a visualisation of Chado, the (japanese) way of tea, a Zen Buddhism concept. The first tea masters were priests, who had taught their followers that enlightenment can only be reached through Zen meditation, and the tea ceremony became a means of disciplining the mind. In Zen, everything which is not necessary is left out; this is as true of the mind as it is as of the physical setting. The spirit of austere simplicity pervades the tea ceremony. Each utensil has a specific purpose, and only those utensils which are necessary for the ceremony are brought into the tea room. I recently saw photos of a modern house in Tokyo which lies on a property of only 72 sqm. Despite the small base area the house has a modern tea room. The image should show some of the near spritual atmosphere of this room. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image is a little study on radiosity and photons. All the csg is coded by hand, the flower is made with Plantstudio. (http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/). Most time was needed to get the light right. The ceiling light with its glass bricks is the only source of sun light. After some trial and error I saved the photon file (ca. 100 MB), changed the glass bricks to an opaque box and rendered again. Next problem was the combination of photons and radiosity, because the render speed was very slow even with very simple radiosity settings. But then a recent posting of Jaimes Vives Piqueres showed the way (http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/20768/?ttop=21037&toff=50). I saved mid quality radiosity data from a simplified csg subset (box instead of a hardly visible csg tatami, box instead of the tansu, no flower) with simple textures (single colors instead of complex textures, no specularity or reflection, no normals). Then the saved radiosity data (ca. 50 MB, render took 79 h) were used in a third final render. So a complete render needs three consecutive steps now. To avoid an ugly moire pattern on the floor,a final render with 2400*1800 pixels was reduced to 800*600 pixels with photoshop. If anyone wants to see more details, the zip file contains a 1200*900 pixel jpg also.