TITLE: The Dreamfactory
NAME: Gerard Schockmel
COUNTRY: Burkina Faso (residence), Luxembourg (citizenship)
EMAIL: msfl.bf@fasonet.bf
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dreamfac.jpg
ZIPFILE: dreamfac.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV for Windows 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Spatch, L-parser, PaintShop Pro 4.1, amphetamins (just kiddin')

RENDER TIME: 
    5h34m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Notebook P120, 24 MegRAM, Win95b



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


When thinking about Arts & Entertainment, the first thing that pops up in my
mind is Hollywood. Mostly in its glory days, but even as it is today.

What really fascinates me about Hollywood is its ability to produce stars,
immortal and world-wide. Marylin Monroe, James Dean, Humphrey Bogard, etc,
etc.
Hollywood puts them in a virtual world, and tries to makes us believe it's
reality. And succeeds...

For my scene, I tried to put sham and reality side by side. As a background, I
chose the good ole western movie, set before an everlasting setting sun.
The right side of the image shows the slide in the projector, the left side the
film stage. Real to reel...

Don't look too close, or Hollywood will never be the same to you...


Many thanks to PortalKeeper, who keeps supplying me with the original ideas of
many of my scenes, including this one. Visit him at :
http://www.thelostportal.com




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Now, let's see. I don't want to bore you with the very obvious stuff.

. The scene was build without modeler.

. The sky : As I wanted to have a setting sun (I'm a poor lonesome cowboy, and a
long, long way from home...), I used halos for the gradient background, the sun
and the clouds. And learned, thanx to the IRTC mailing list, that lots of halos
means lots of max_trace_level, lots of samples, and therefore lots of patience.
But I'm rambling...

. For this scene, I learned to use the #while loop a lot. All buildings and
footwalks are built either from single planks, or bricks. In the loops, I added
random rotate and translate in each texture to avoid repetition in the grain. 
I didn't realize that wood textures are pretty tough to work with, as it was my
first time to use them extensively. Thanks go to Steffen Heinicke and his
excellent tutorial on wood in the german Webzine D.P.M. II
(ftp://ftp.liteline.de/pub/dpm/dpm2_mag.zip). Cheers also to the editor of the
'zine, Joachim Thewes. Keep up the good work!

. The barrel : made a curved plank in SPatch, then orbited them around the
origin.

. The tree : made with L-parser (slightly modified TREE007). The noose was made
using a cubic_splined prism. As it is far away, one doesn't see that it isn't
round.

. The film-thingy is just a difference of a box and a superquadratic ellipsoid,
moved in front of the camera. The camera in the reflection is the same as the
one in the picture. 

. My signature (G.S.) is a difference{} in the ground, supposedly written with a
stick in the sand. Made out of tori, cylinders, cones, and spheres.

. The Saloon door is made out of prisms and lathe, the rail on the 2nd floor, as
well as the saloon sign, are prisms.

. Ground and mountains are height_fields.

. All the rest are CSG objects (houses, camera, gun, etc)


Best luck to my fellow competitionners, and to myself, of course ;)