TITLE: Detention
NAME: Simon Marsh
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: Simon.Marsh@prnet.co.uk
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: detentn.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0 (Linux & Windows Version)

TOOLS USED: 
    xv, emacs, photoshop 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    approx 500 hrs of CPU time

HARDWARE USED: 
    486DX2 66 for development, 4xP166, 3xPP200, P120, P100, P90 for
final render .

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Its after school on a nice sunny day, and our poor, over enthusiastic pupil
is in detention after an unfortunate accident. Who could blame him going just
a bit too far during the practical experiment of an otherwise very dull
phsyics lesson ?

The lines on the paper read 
'Football should not be played inside the classroom'


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Boy did this image take a long time to render. To cram what should have taken
a single computer nearly a month of render time into 4 days of hectic 
processing I split the rendering up across as many spare machines as I 
could get my hands on. Each machine did a set number of rows, and the 
results were pasted together to form the final image.

So why did it take so long ?

Three things probably contributed most to the render time. 

The big killer is the fact that there is the equivalent of several hundred
light sources in the scene. Each of the 12 overhead lights is an area light
and these combine with a very large area light outside the window to give
all those soft shadows.
Look on the right side of the room, and near the blackboard to see the
wonderful shadows created by the exterior light light. On the right side 
of the room near the map you can even see a highlight created by the break 
in the glass.

The second killer is the large number of reflective and transparent surfaces.
Apart from the obvious huge windows on the left, the calculator, the pen,
the door and even the wood to a certain extent is reflective and/or 
transparent. 

Finally, virtually every object in the scene has multiple textures. I was
trying to get that dirty worn look that schools seem to have and to this effect
most objects have added 'dirt' textures to them. These are semi transparent
layers to try and make the objects look as though they have patches of
dirt and wear on them. 
Also, many of the 'square' objects arent actually square, but are 
superellipsoids instead. ie they have rounded corners to try and make them
a bit more natural.
The most obvious example is the calculator. The calculator shape and buttons
are superellipsoids and the whole thing is crusted with a dirt map.

Only the map (its of downtown L.A. apparently, it just happened to be a nice
map that I could find), the blackboard and the paper are image maps. All the
other textures/objects are povray generated (even the numbers on the clock
and calculator). The blackboard and paper were created in photoshop 4.

Hopefully all this render time has created an image that you'll enjoy. If
anyone wants to take a look at the source, its available on request.