TITLE: "curious goods" NAME: Denton Gentry COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: denny1@home.com WEBPAGE: http://members.home.net/denny1/rolemaster/ TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: criusgds.jpg ZIPFILE: criusgds.zip RENDERER USED: Pov Ray 3.1a Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: BBEdit (text editor) ClarisWorks (for the GIF image) Quicktime PictureViewer (to convert to jpg) RENDER TIME: 17 hours 20 minutes HARDWARE USED: PowerMac 8500 (PPC 604e 180 MHz), 160 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Edwin, the Loremaster, has just stepped out in a rush. He is a bit absentminded, and has left a candle burning (its ok, Mathilda will snuff it out shortly). Mathilda is Edwin's faithful assistant. Mathilda is a cursed shapeshifter, assuming any of a vast number of animal and plant shapes with no control over the form. Fortunately Mathilda can still move about and grasp things in all forms, even as a rosemary bush as shown here. Edwin has also left his spectacles, (so we must hope that his task will not require him to read anything), and his rain cap: its the one on the center stand on the table in back. He's still wearing his "indoor" hat, which would sit on the stand on the right were he not wearing it. He'll probably ruin yet another indoor hat by wearing it out in the rain (its ok, the remaining hat on the stand is a spare). Being a gnome, having the proper hat for every occasion is very important for Edwin. In fact, the only thing Edwin always remembers to do before leaving is flip the sign over to the "OUT" position. We can see the wear marks on the sign where Edwin's thumb has grasped it. Strangely, gnomish skin oils are slightly corrosive to wood, and they have to use an additive in their paper making process to ensure that their precious books do not suffer for it. With the coming of the Coalition Edwin dove headfirst into the study of their tools and methods. The back room (formerly a alchemical lab) has been converted into a machine room. The Coalition Mk 30 shipborne computer system can be seen prominently. Any resemblance to a Cray-1 of 20th century Earth is entirely coincidental. Edwin rushed out after reading an item he just printed from an obscure site on the Coalition data network. This "Chronicle" has an eerily accurate account of the actions of a group of Ascension fighters and their struggles against the minions of the Unlife. It is up to Edwin to find the source of this information, and make sure it poses no threat to the Ascension. Unfortunately, he also forgot to bring the printout with him, leaving it on the desk under his spectacles. Also on the desk we see a few items brought here for study by the very group detailed in the Chronicle. The flute is an ancient Elvish artifact of the First Era. It is magical, though its exact powers are unknown (which is why it is here being studied by a Loremaster). The Mana Compass points in the direction of the nearest Earth Node, an ability which has proven valuable on several occasions. The pocket computer contains details of Coalition military deployments in the area. The pipe bowl is just a pipe bowl, Edwin finds Halfling pipe-weed to be very relaxing. The books are works Edwin was consulting, pulled from the reference stacks in the back room, which is barely visible in the rear of the shop. The most commonly consulted reference works are kept on the front shelves arrayed about Edwin's desk. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The paper in the foreground is a bicubic_patch. The text is a GIF image of the opening text from the chronicle for the Rolemaster role playing game group I play in, the "Imaginary World" of this scene. The Chronicle is hosted at http://members.home.net/denny1/rolemaster/ The glasses resting on the paper are CSG of spheres and torii. The bifocals are made via intersections of the basic lens shape with a truncated cylinder, with a different index of refraction for the bifocal versus the main lens. The candle is a blob, of cylinders and spheres. Staring at a candle flame for hours is a great way to relax. Candle flame is slightly bluish and mostly transparent at the bottom, becoming suddenly bright yellow slightly above the wick. Viewed close up the candle flame never comes to a single point, always a hollow-tip cone. Unfortunately the model of the hollow-tip cone looks wierd from a distance so a simple cone is used in this scene. The books are boxes and cylinders, with text on the spine. They are constructed from arrays of titles, textures, and measurements. This caused a problem late in the project when I attempted to move to a Sparcstation to get faster rendering times: POV-Ray 3.1 is not available for SunOS/Solaris yet, only 3.0.2 (which lacks arrays). So the Sparc could only be used for experimentation with the books commented out, the final rendering was done on a Macintosh. Mathilda is a screaming horde of cylinders. The Mathilda model had to be simplified drastically from my original plan, as it took 3 days on the PowerMac to render (the Sparcstation was able to render the same scene in 15 hours, albeit without the bookks due to lack of arrays). The Cray in the back room was constructed by referencing various pictures found at supercomputer sites on the net. It is a Cray-1, circa 1976 and still an amazing engineering achievement. Edwin's private electrical substation (required for a Cray-1) must be out back somewhere. One liberty was taken: the Cray-1 was generally painted a deep navy blue. Silicon Valley legend holds that when Apple Computer took delivery of their Cray Y-MP they said "nice machine, just one problem: its not purple". Cray rectified this flaw shortly (as did Edwin, apparently). The "Loremaster is OUT" sign is reversible with a #declare, for when Edwin returns. The Mana Compass and Palm Computer models were created last year for use as illustrations in the Chronicle. CREDITS: MERO_DEM Truetype font courtesy of R. Kainhofer, Austria klang truetype font origin unknown Eureka_Wood texture used on the desk top courtesy Charles Fusner (http://www.enter.net/~cfusner) Sonya Roberts's plants.inc and books.inc were inspirational (though not used in the scene) special thanks to Marc Mangus, GameMaster of the Rolemaster game this image is based upon, and to Dave Brubeck, Helen Kittler, Lisa Paulick, Eric Peterson, Bryan Gebhardt, and Brian Mays, the regular players in that Rolemaster game.