Hi to the crowd,

some weeks (months?) ago I posted the geometry of the stone of orlov to the
p.b.s-f (under my now abandoned nick of TawnyOwl) and promised to investigate
the texturing of this special stone. Alain was so kind to give some advice and I
searched the newsgroups for other hints and found a material by Bruno Cabasson
which looked best among the published ones (some authors showed very fine
diamonds in the p.b.i. but gave no hint how they crafted the stones
unfortunatelly). In fact Alain and Bruno nearly proposed the same material.
There were only slight deviations in some parameters. That was really helpful,
since I only had to investigate this deviations. Many thanks to Alain and Bruno.

I played around with the parameters in animated sequences one after the other
and ended somewhere between both proposals. For example Alain proposed to use
"some reflection". So I started an animation which chanced the reflection step
by step and in the end I decided the physically correct value (amount of
incoming light=reflection + refraction) looked best. That should be so, but in
raytracing settings not exactly modelling physics can look better. A very
helpful hint by Alain was the use of an HDRI-Lighting which improved the scene
much. In fact the stone is at the table of Jaimes Vives Piqueres kitchen (since
I used his "thekitchen.hdr"). My main idea was to approximate a picture by Elkan
Wijnberg, which can easily be found with google, or better the caustics present
there to prove the best material. Since the lighting and camera position in the
original picture is unknown to me, I could only go for a similiar picture. But I
think I have achieved this goal.

Please excuse, that I didn't model the sceptre in every detail. The information
about it in the net is very limited. All other pictures I found were very small
in size and I have not the opportunity to travel to the Kreml this days to look
at the original diamond, unfortunatelly. But I wanted to have all the smaller
stones in a similiar position. For example I used another Saint Georg with the
inlay. I liked the version of August Macke, an German painter, most and his
copyright is expired since he is now 98 years dead.

I will thank Bruno and Alain for their help again, FlyerX for his wonderful
PoseRasy, Jaime Vives Piqueres for his kitchen, the unknown author of gems.inc
for his brillant57 (the link to the source is broken by now) and Peter Houston
for the blobman-hands. And of course Elkan Wijnberg for his picture and his
permission to use it for any purpose while mentioning his name.

Here is the material I finaly used, a parametrization and a slight modification
of Bruno Cabassons macro:
\begin{verbatim}
#macro M_Diamond (_color, _purety, _samples, _density)
    texture{
       pigment {rgbt <1,1,1,_purety>}
       finish {
#declare ReflValue=1-_purety;
          reflection { ReflValue fresnel }
          conserve_energy
          specular 0.8 roughness 0.005
          ambient 0 diffuse 0
       }
    }
    interior {
        ior 2.417 //1.51
        #if (_samples != 0)
            dispersion 1.044
            dispersion_samples _samples
        #end
        fade_power 1001
        fade_color _color
        fade_distance 1/_density
//        media {samples 1 scattering{1, 0.01}}
    }
#end

#declare MatDens=15/100;
#declare MatColor=<35/50,45/50,1>;

#declare GrossmogulMat=material { M_Diamond(MatColor,0.99,15,MatDens)}
\end{verbatim}

And here is the picture:

Best Regards,
Michael

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Attachments:
Download 'catherines sceptre pbi.jpg' (68 KB)

Preview of image 'catherines sceptre pbi.jpg'

And here is the stone in his natural environment. As soon as I saw the stone I
recognized him as the egg of the long forgotten diamond cuckoo. In a case of
need his mother dropped her egg in the nest of a magpie. The magpie - unaware of
the betrayal - tried to nurse her beloved son and soon recognized that he was
very fond of precious stones, golds and other juwelry. So she tried to find thst
kind of food for him and tries it even until today...

(In fact I've only once noticed that magpies were fond of shiny things. It was a
cherry cake my wife has forgotten in our small garden wrapped in aluminiun
foliage...).

Best regrads,

Michael and enyoy my lost entry to the TC-RTC April 2012.

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Attachments:
Download 'magpiecuckoo_pbi.jpg' (60 KB)

Preview of image 'magpiecuckoo_pbi.jpg'

Am 20.08.2012 21:38, schrieb MichaelJF:
> And here is the stone in his natural environment. As soon as I saw the stone I
> recognized him as the egg of the long forgotten diamond cuckoo. In a case of
> need his mother dropped her egg in the nest of a magpie. The magpie - unaware of
> the betrayal - tried to nurse her beloved son and soon recognized that he was
> very fond of precious stones, golds and other juwelry. So she tried to find thst
> kind of food for him and tries it even until today...

Absolutely superb!

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Fantastic! It has such a beautiful atmosphere...

--
Jaime

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 20.08.2012 21:38, schrieb MichaelJF:
> > And here is the stone in his natural environment. As soon as I saw the stone I
> > recognized him as the egg of the long forgotten diamond cuckoo. In a case of
> > need his mother dropped her egg in the nest of a magpie. The magpie - unaware of
> > the betrayal - tried to nurse her beloved son and soon recognized that he was
> > very fond of precious stones, golds and other juwelry. So she tried to find thst
> > kind of food for him and tries it even until today...
>
> Absolutely superb!

I will thank you a lot, I never expected such praise, in the original picture
the coin by Jaime would not have been. But since I have lost the deadline due to

"radiosity+area light+focal blur=infinity rendering" was appropriate, since I
used all of them. In fact the main problem due to rendering time was that I had
to raise the max_trace_level a bit...

Best regards,
Michael

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Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:
> Fantastic! It has such a beautiful atmosphere...
>
> --
> Jaime

I never expected such a response to my picture. I really thank you, your opion
is very valuable to me, since I have learned nearly everything about ray-tracing
from your contributions to the community. I hope I can give a little bit back to
the community the one or other day... I'm working on that.

Best regards,
Michael

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On 20/08/12 23:58, MichaelJF wrote:
> I never expected such a response to my picture. I really thank you,
> your opion is very valuable to me, since I have learned nearly
> everything about ray-tracing from your contributions to the
> community.

   I'm glad I helped...

> I hope I can give a little bit back to the community the one or other
> day... I'm working on that.

   Just making beautiful images like this one is enough, as it shows what
POV-Ray is capable of, and inspires others to create.

--
Jaime

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On 20/08/12 23:16, MichaelJF wrote:
> the coin by Jaime...

   OMG, my memory is seriously hurt: I had to check out that indeed this
was one of my coins.. it looked familiar, but I was not sure at all. :)

--
Jaime

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Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:
> On 20/08/12 23:16, MichaelJF wrote:
> > the coin by Jaime...
>
>    OMG, my memory is seriously hurt: I had to check out that indeed this
> was one of my coins.. it looked familiar, but I was not sure at all. :)
>
> --
> Jaime

LOL, thank you for the piece. After nine years I would have the same memory
problems (stacked coins seems to be from 2003). But it reminded me that I have
forgotten to give credits for the "The Tale of the Magpie and the Diamond
Cuckoo" which is the title of the picture. A long time during the creation of
the picture Michael Hough's nest (Bluejay in the IRTC June 1998) was my dummy
before I created my own nest, but still his feathers have survived (with another
texture) as the tail of the magpie. And the gras (completely invisible due to
the focal blur) is created with the macros by Gilles Tran. The rest - especially
the japanese tea house - is my own creation.

Best regards,
Michael

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"MichaelJF" <mi-### [at] t-onlinede> wrote:
> Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:
> > On 20/08/12 23:16, MichaelJF wrote:
> > > the coin by Jaime...
> >
> >    OMG, my memory is seriously hurt: I had to check out that indeed this
> > was one of my coins.. it looked familiar, but I was not sure at all. :)
> >
> > --
> > Jaime
>
> LOL, thank you for the piece. After nine years I would have the same memory
> problems (stacked coins seems to be from 2003). But it reminded me that I have
> forgotten to give credits for the "The Tale of the Magpie and the Diamond
> Cuckoo" which is the title of the picture. A long time during the creation of
> the picture Michael Hough's nest (Bluejay in the IRTC June 1998) was my dummy
> before I created my own nest, but still his feathers have survived (with another
> texture) as the tail of the magpie. And the gras (completely invisible due to
> the focal blur) is created with the macros by Gilles Tran. The rest - especially
> the japanese tea house - is my own creation.
>
> Best regards,
> Michael

If anyone of you has an interest in a wallpaper rendering at a resolution of
1920*1080 of this picture (the tale of the magpie and the diamond cuckoo) please
tell me here. I render it for my own collection (now at 87%, after more than 23
days). It should be complete next week. I will post it, if anyone is interested.

Best regards,
Michael

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