During the recent POVCOMP 2004 competition, I created a lot of fairly detailed models that I think other people might find useful for their own ray-tracing work.
By clicking on the above picture, you can download a zip file that
contains
both the Pencil.inc and the Pencil.pov
files. The include
file contains the models and the pov file demonstrates their use.
This model is very similar to the one I used for pencils in my POVCOMP
entry. I wasn't quite satisfied with that one, since I hadn't had
time to work on the textures, so I improved them before releasing this
include file. The model is built using the hexagon shape from shapes.inc
I used a created a "sharpener", an object made up of zy-planes rotated
in the z-axis
and around the x-axis to cut away the material at the tip of the
pencil. In order to get a slightly used looking pencil tip, I
clipped the first three millimeters off the tip of the pencil and stuck
on a small sphere. The text impressed into the pencil by
subtracting a text object from the body of the pencil.
There are several macros in the include file. The only two you
are likely to use are Make_Pencil() and Make_Unsharpened_Pencil()
. There are examples in the Pencil.pov file that
is included in the zip file.