TITLE: A study in ceramics
NAME: David Heys
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: arcana@sinbad.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.sinbad.net/~arcana
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: museum.jpg
ZIPFILE: museum.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.02 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    4 hrs, 47 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 w. 48 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This is a shot of a corner of a museum exhibit. The two items shown are both
ceramic creations of an artist named Witherin (an old MUD alias of mine).  The
series of three pieces in the foreground are depictions of the ocean at night,
showing the moon rising into the night sky.  The piece off in the background 
is a fanciful piece hinting at both a piece of coral and the sun.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


While trying to come up with a scene for the Night theme, I wanted to do 
something away from the expected.  So, instead of doing a night scene, I chose 
to create a piece of art that would represent night.  I didn't quite get what 
I wanted when I started playing with blob components, but I'm happy with the
results.  One of the things I've learned in the past about creating art is
that often it's best if you only have a nebulous direction in mind when you
get started, rahter than a fixed destination.  That way, you can allow the
diversions and digressions to take you to places you'd possibly never find
by sticking to a firm destination.  This, to a greater degree is what happened
with this whole image.

Alright, let's start with the three panels of the Night object. Each panel is 
a series of blob components assembled using #while loops.  The advantage of
blobs is the ability to get subtle surfacing and being able to take advantage
of how components with differing textures react to each other.  All in all, 
there are almost 10000 components amongst the three panels.

The Coral Sun object is another #while'd blob.  I used a heavy crackle normal 
to get the nice texturing on the Coral Sun.

The text on the two sings was all done as text objects in POV, rather than as 
image maps. It seemed like the easiest way to do it.

The floor is a series of boxes with two wood textures, coupled with 
superellipsoids of a soft marbled stone texture.  I used randomizers and 
rotations to try and give each piece of wood and stone it's own portion of 
their respective patterns.

I'm really happy with the walls in the room.  I'd like to offer up thanks to
Jaime Vives Piqueres for his inadvertant inspiration.  I'd known about his
favoring the use of height fields to create interesting objects and surfacing,
like doors and stone walls.  Last week I was playing around in photoshop, 
trying to create a new tilable image to be used as a background for a client's
website, when an idea struck me.  With some judicious experimentation, I
came up with the textured walls of the museum room.  It's a height field of
an 800X600 pixel Targa image I created in Photoshop.  I took the height field,
scaled it to <10, 0.375, 10> and ran it in a series of nested #while loops.
All in all, there are about 196 height fields used to create the two walls.

That's about it. I hope you all enjoy the image. I'm truly looking forward to
seeing what everyone else has to offer. :{)

David Heys
arcana@sinbad.net