TITLE: Recess NAME: Charlie Tangora COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: charlie495@aol.com WEBPAGE: http://www.latin.pvt.k12.il.us/users/2000/ctangora/ TOPIC: school COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: ctreces.jpg ZIPFILE: ctreces.zip RENDERER USED: POVray 3.0 TOOLS USED: Blob Sculptor, POVSB, LParser, a text editor, and my trusty graph paper RENDER TIME: 36 05 59 total HARDWARE USED: Cyrix 586-100 MHz, 36 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When I saw the theme, the first thing that popped to mind was an apple on a teacher's desk - I see tons of images like that in school propaganda. I figured there'd be about 87,364 entries like that. My imagination wouldn't provide me with anything better, though, so I started to think about variations on the idea. I had already thought of creating some CSG robots for my own entertainment, so one day in the middle of P.E. (I do most of my thinking there) I thought of combining the two ideas, and the scene wrote itself from there. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Too little time, too little processing power. The image with everything in it would probably have taken well over two thousand hours to render. I wound up isolating the time hogs and taking them out. I lost the text on the book spines and my lovely soft shadows. Anybody wanna buy me an SGI? The robots' heads and bodies were done in Blob Sculptor, the tree was one of the sample files that came with LParser, and the apple was done with a lathe, a bezier patch, and a clipped torus in POVSB. Everything else was done with my handy graph paper and text editor (haven't failed me yet!), including robotic legs and arms. Never underestimate the power of the superquadric ellipsoid! Huge thanks to whatever visionary put that in POV-Ray 3. Half the shapes in the scene are based on it. The book covers are superellipsoids, the corners of the blotter-what-do-you-call-it are superellipsoids - I could go on for a long time. Now, I wanted to have sunlight streaming through the windows and illuminating the scene, but half my textures need the normal manipulation (and hence sone diffuse light shining on them) to look like anything. What to do? Finally, instead of ambient light, I modeled a giant 8x8 area_light up by the ceiling of the scene. As far as rendering times go, that was stupid, but it made the ambient light in the scene look _great_, possibly even better than radiosity could have done it (And I wanted the 'trace to be done by the year 2175, so radiosity didn't bear thinking about.) Unfortunately, deadlines caught up with me, and I had to cut out all my area lights. The robots were tons of fun to do. I used at least 86,000 rotations and translations to ensure that at some point or another, the arm/leg/whatever could be rotated around the right center. Then I spent hours upon hours trying to figure out which axis to rotate the arms and legs about - and by how much - in order to get the pose I wanted. (I'm sure you've heard of inverse kinematics. This is forward trial-and-error kinematics. Much less fun. Also much cheaper. Since my raytracing budget for the year was about 8 cents, I really didn't have much choice, now did I?) Teztures are from a variety of sources. The wood textures are my own versions of the textures in "woods.inc." The leather is a version of a texture I found on the net; I couldn't find the site again to give credit. The metal is straight out of textures.inc. All other textures are my own. WARNING: If you download the source, don't expect to get much use out of it. I am not neat. I will not understand the source myself in a few months' time. Also, I cut out a good bit of the larger program-generated files. There is no tree, the apple is composed of much fewer polygons, and you'll have to come up with your own images for the papers on the table. Just give it any two Targas named "hw.tga" and "hw1.tga."