TITLE: My View of the World
NAME: Matthew Welch
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: daffyduckx@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~daffy-duck/raytrace/raytrace.htm
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: myview.jpg
ZIPFILE: myview.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    N/A

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 39 minutes 38.0 seconds (9578 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    PentiumII 266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is what the world looks like from my seat at work. Actually, This
is the exciting view. I spend most of the time facing the other way,
looking at my computer.

The more I thought about the topic of horror the more I realized that
nothing could be much more horrible than working in cubicles. The office I
work in is just an endless stretch of cubicles, all pretty much the same.
If I go out my door, turn left, and walk a little way I can actually
look out a window. But then all I look out on is a parking lot: rows and
rows of cars for the rows and rows of people. It's about the most
dehumanized environment you can create. It basically says, "You're not
actual people to US. You're just identical little corporate zombies
obediently clacking away on your keyboards." If things can get much more
horrible than that, I don't want to know about it.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This really wasn't too hard. Once you've modeled one section of cubicle
wall, you're pretty much done. Just copy it several thousand times and
you could model the whole building. I put all my effort into the textures.
I tried to get all the textures to look as close to the real thing as I
could. I am pretty new to POV-Ray so there were probably some things I
could have done better. For instance, I hadn't figured out how to set all
the gamma settings so if you try out my source the brightness might be
messed up.

Light sources are actually placed just below the level of the ceiling,
which you can tell by looking at the area right around the foremost light.
This led to some problems getting lighting levels to look good but it was
impossible to realisticly model the lights recessed in the ceiling as they
actually are. I think the result comes out looking ok.

I applied a fine normal texture to the panels on the cubicle walls, which
are covered in fabric. The bottom panel is plastic, but with a different
texture than the plastic corner-joint piece.

For the floor I applied a couple layers of darker bozo texturing to try
to model traffic patterns and stains in the carpet.