TITLE: The history classroom NAME: Romain Guillard COUNTRY: France EMAIL: rguillard@claranet.fr WEBPAGE: http://browse.to/roms_3d_p@ges TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT JPGFILE: rg_histo.jpg RENDERER USED: Vue d'Esprit 2 TOOLS USED: sPatch, Paint Shop Pro 4 RENDER TIME: 7h 30 mn 53s HARDWARE: Pentium 200, 32 Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This history classroom is like what they whould always be: living. History is, imho, very important for us to know who we are and that's why history teachers should try to take hold of children's interrest. There's no better way to do so than replacing the chalkboard by a window, opened on the world so that pupils are captivated by the lesson instead of playing with their Gameboy. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I've always enjoyed history lessons in school so I wanted to do something about it and then I had the idea of making the classroom more "living" by replacing the chalkboard by a window. The question was: what should I show through this window ? The answer came quickly: pyramids. Two reasons for this choice: I've always been fascinated by this part of history and at the time I started creating this image it was just one year after my trip to Egypt to see those pyramids for real. I know the pyramids are not set up like in the reality but I just wanted to make an ideal representation of them (with the River Nile, palm trees, the desert...). All objects present in this image were modelled by myself (but for the boat which is a model by Matthew Hart). I either used sPatch or boolean operations on primitives to create them. The pyramids are not just a mapped picture, they are a scene inside the scene. I did this because I wanted the chalkboard to be a truly opened window and not just look like it were. The old map on the wall is a reproduction of a painting by Th_odore de Bry (1596) showing 4 great explorators (the ones we can see are Christopher Colombus and Amerigo Vespucci, the ones on the right part of the painting, which we can not see, were Magellan and Pizarre) around a approximative representation of the New World. I chose this image because those people have played a very important role in our history, discovering new worlds.