TITLE: Out like a light.
NAME: Jason Halliday
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: halliday@negia.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.negia.net/~halliday
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: out.jpg
ZIPFILE: out.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-ray 3.02.watcom.win32 Pentium Optimized

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhino3D
          Moray 3.0 for Windows: Build 2409
          Fractint for Windows 18.21
          Photoshop 4 

RENDER TIME: 
    Approximately 1 hour 43 minutes.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 75, 40 megs ram.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        I almost called this image self portrait, for I have many times myself
fallen asleep in front of the TV!  However, this apartment is a little cleaner
than my own, and has fewer animals running around in it!!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

             Most of the objects were made in Rhino3D, (luckily still in its
free beta period.)  I have yet to find an easier way to quickly model accurate
shapes than with trimmed nurbs.  Its convenient Moray UDO output is easy to
use;  the only drawback is the huge number of triangles Rhino likes to throw
around.  This scene only has a few objects, around 80 by POV_s count, but still
managed to pull a peak memory use of around 50 megs!  Along the way I noticed
an interesting phenomenon.  I saved vast amounts of system resources by taking
advantage of Moray_s copy function.  For example, the legs of the TV stand,
along with the rest of it, as output by Rhino used up almost 30 megs.  Far to
much for a simple rotate sweep.  However, by exporting only one of the legs
from Rhino and then copying it in Moray,  I discovered that somehow each copy
only used a miniscule amount of ram.  Maybe this is documented, (I have yet to
finish any documentation I start!)  At any rate, the scene took about 15
minutes to parse.  
        Originally, the idea I had in mind was to have the feet up front and
center, as if seen from an easy chair, but was not happy with the shading on
the feet.  The legs were loosely based on a model I downloaded from a site I
have yet to find again, (I forgot to bookmark), but were only used to help me
get the proportions right.  Everything else was actually based on furniture
right here in my house.  Modeling is much easier if you have something real to
go by.  The image on the wall is one of the first images I created with POV,
and the fractal was made with Fractint for Windows.  Be sure to check out the
image maps in the source file, (especially the beer label, which was made in
Photoshop.) Oh yeah... the static was also made in Photoshop, and is simply
black and white noise. I didn't include all the UDOs, because they are quite
large, but feel free to look at the .pov and .inc file to get an idea of how
everything was set up.  Well, this being my first entry in the competition, I
hope it goes well, and inspires someone else as much as the competition has
inspired me.