EMAIL: hobbes@gate.net NAME: Kyle Johnson TOPIC: Music COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Glass Armonica COUNTRY: USA RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6.1a TOOLS USED: Wings 3D 0.98.29b, Gimp 2.2 to scale the image and add text RENDER TIME: 32 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4; 2.0 GHz; 1.0 GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Benjamin Franklin invented the Glass Armonica in the late 1700’s. It produces a haunting musical sound using the same concept as running a moist finger around the rim of a wine glass. Both Mozart and Beethoven composed music specifically for the Armonica. A web search for “Glass Armonica” will produce quite a bit of detailed information for those that are interested. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first entry to the IRTC. I learned much while producing this image, like try to have the entire composition in mind before starting to work on the image. That would have saved me allot of time working on the details that you really can’t see in the final image! Anyway… I tried to get some of the difficult tasks out of the way right up front. I created the glass bowls first, initially using an isosurface, then instead ended up using CSG when the isosurface bowls proved to render much too slowly. The bowls are not simply scaled; the glass thickness remains consistent as well as the diameter of the neck of the bowls. I achieved this by writing a macro to calculate the appropriate values for each component that makes up the bowl. I then created the cork stoppers that hold the bowls on the shaft. This is one area where I ended up spending too much time creating a nice looking isosurface cork, only to replace it with CSG using a procedural texture in the end. Next came the legs, which I created in Wings. I built the rest of the cabinet using CSG on top of the legs. The drawer pulls are height fields with sphere sweeps for the handles. The bolt heads are height fields. The bolt heads have raised lettering, another area where time was unnecessarily spent. After I complete basic construction of the Armonica, I decided to place it in a basic Victorian style setting, so I completed the walls, wallpaper, wainscoting, floor and lighting at that time. I must give credit to http://imageafter.com and http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/ for their wonderful free textures, some of which were used for several of the metal objects in the image. Additionally, thanks very much to Tony at http://victorianwallpaper.com for permission to use one of their images for the wallpaper in the scene.