A Crystal Ball

My First Povray Project

Below you will find a sequence of images that show the evolution of my very first Povray project. By today's standards it is quite primitive, but the excitement it generated in the early 90's was very real! The subject is a crystal ball mounted on four blood red marble columns. Forming in the center of the ball is an explosive burst of energy. The final product took a day to render way back in the 90's.

Version 1: The view point is a bit low. There has been no real texture added to the sphere in the center. The only lighting is external, and is a bit high. There are no energy bolts from the columns.

Version 2: We have added the energy bolts from each column. The image is still quick to ray-trace.

Version 3: This version has the exploding energy geometry added around the center sphere -- they are all cones. The problem now is that the center is too dark to see.

Version 4: We need to know how to compensate for light lost as it passes through the crystal ball, so we have removed the crystal in this version. Once we have an idea of how bright it is without the crystal, we can correct for the absorption effect.

Version 5. Here the light of the center energy field is increased to compensate for the lost light passing through the crystal ball.

Version 6: This last version is much brighter. There are now several light sources inside the crystal ball, but outside the energy sphere. They are each the primary color of the energy sphere so that they will lay down lighting effects on other objects in the image. This effect could have been achieved by placing a very powerful white light source in the center of the energy sphere, but the rendering time would have been way too slow. Also in this version the lights external to the spheres have been moved away and lowered.