Hi everyone,

It's a rendering of iron sulfide, also known as Fool's Gold around these 
parts...

The pyrite was modeled in LightWave. I used angle values from 
KrystalShaper, so what you see here is a fairly accurate representation 
(within two decimal places, anyway).

The whole thing was rendered in five passes on 3-4 cores, taking about 
13 minutes altogether. It would have been much longer if I hadn't used 
compositing techniques. Once again, I used Rune's illusion.inc to 
composite the images. It was a learning experience putting it all 
together... quite a puzzle in fact.

The hardest part, however, was trying to convert the original file from 
LightWave format to something POV could read, while still preserving the 
UV maps. In the end, I had to load the lw file into Blender, join the 
meshes, export as lw format again, load into PoseRay and save as an .inc 
file.

The final image was cropped and bordered in Gimp.

There are some aliasing artifacts present on some of the striations. I 
don't know what causes them, but it's worth looking into.

Questions and comments are always appreciated~

Sam

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Attachments:
Download 'pyrite_cluster.jpg' (48 KB)

Preview of image 'pyrite_cluster.jpg'

You're friggin amazing!  I wish I could say something more constructive...

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That's very close to a textbook pyrite, Sam. Congratulations.
The only (small) thing that I would dare to say is that maybe the striations 
appear a bit too strong in some places? Could be the effect of lighting.

Thomas

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nemesis wrote:
> You're friggin amazing!

Thanks!

> I wish I could say something more constructive...

That's okay!

Sam

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Thomas de Groot wrote:
> That's very close to a textbook pyrite, Sam. Congratulations.

Thank you, Thomas :)

> The only (small) thing that I would dare to say is that maybe the striations 
> appear a bit too strong in some places? Could be the effect of lighting.

There are geometrical striations and striations which are surface 
normals... Which do you mean, do you know? But you're right. I'm leaning 
towards fixing them both, and re-rendering the whole thing now that I 
have the technique down. What I'd *really* like to achieve is that 
accumulative look crystal faces often have... it's kind of like a 
cellular automation where the values have been divided.... I could try 
something in SDL, but I hate to make such a large detour if it doesn't, 
ahem, pan out.

Photons would be nice... But you can't render photons without a visible 
photon target with the new version of POV-Ray. The compositing technique 
relies on having the pyrite cluster invisible at some point. Maybe I can 
render the photons in 3.6... just rambling here :)

Also, I see some triangles showing here and there. Gotta fix all the 
details, and try to pass it off as a photo to a mineral-hunting friend 
of mine >:)

Sam

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"stbenge" <THI### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
news:488cdbac@news.povray.org...

> and re-rendering the whole thing now that I have the technique down.

    Heh, there's nothing like gettin' it down Sam. :)

    Your image? As always, a real teaser as to what you're chasing in the 3D 
world of graphics. Keep at it, you've always had this talent.

      ~Steve~




> Sam

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St. wrote:
> "stbenge" <THI### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
> news:488cdbac@news.povray.org...
> 
>> and re-rendering the whole thing now that I have the technique down.
> 
>     Heh, there's nothing like gettin' it down Sam. :)
> 
>     Your image? As always, a real teaser as to what you're chasing in the 3D 
> world of graphics. Keep at it, you've always had this talent.

Thanks, Steve.

I've been working on the image almost all day... but I just can't seem 
to get things right. If it's not the lighting, it's the overall shape... 
I might come back to it when decide to update my website.

Sam

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