TITLE: Any Color, As Long As It's Black NAME: Scot Shaw COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: sshaw@fas.harvard.edu WEBPAGE: www.fas.harvard.edu/~sshaw TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: modelt.jpg ZIPFILE: modelt.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray RENDER TIME: 4 hours, 5 minutes HARDWARE USED: 266 MHz Pentium, 64 Megs of RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A simpler time, in 1920's America. If you had a car it was a Model T, and it was black. (The title refers to a perhaps apocryphal saying of Henry Ford.) We see here a typical store front on a (somewhat deserted) street. Not meant to deptict a particular place or time, this image is just a snapshot of the era. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first entry into the IRTC, so I made some rookie mistakes. I spent much too much time on the Model T (most of the first month) so that when other things in life demanded time I was left scrambling to finish the rest of the image in late April. The purist in me also couldn't resist putting details into the car that can't even be seen in the final image (for example, there are rivots in the engine compartment). The car, building design, lamp posts, and other aspect of the image were designed from pictures that I could find from the 1920's, and Model T collector pages on the internet. I found that I could use a command in POV-Ray to make the final image greyscale, and I agonized over whether to use it or not. On the one hand, there is a lot of information in the colors of the image, and I did spend time getting them right. But the greyscale image just looked more authentic. In the end, I had to go with the color image; if you are curious, you can just alter it to greyscale in an image editor. I also had some problems with gamma correction, since my screen has a gamma of one and as a result my image looked too dark on other PCs. I don't use any programs other than POV-Ray, but in the future I might...so that I can put people in my images. I have tried in the past to build up a realistic person by myself, but just can't get anywhere close. I am hoping to draw in some comments on this image that will be useful in future entries. If nothing else, I have the Model T object that I can use in future scenes.