TITLE: ARE YOU CRAZY!
NAME: Michael Miller
EMAIL: BlackMariah@Techie.com
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mmlab.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay for Windows v3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray v3.2, Spatch, Hamapatch

RENDER TIME: 
    about three and a half hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 566MHZ 32 MB RAM (to be upgraded VERY shortly)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"I wonder', the doctor thought to himself 'if a person is falling from a great
height, eventually he falls faster than the air around him can move out of the
way, right? Well, eventually all that air will build up underneath him like an
air pillow or something." Dr. Pynchon looked out of his office window at the
large building across the street. "If I could get someone to jump off that
building, I could prove this, but who would do that?" He thought about it for a
minute, and then out loud said,"I know, I'll get

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I can't take complete credit for this image. I was at Gilles Trans' website
(www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/gtran.en.html) and one of the pictures on
there was his IRTC entry from earlier this year entitled "The Wet Bird". I
hadn't looked at the story on his site about it, so I did. If you go and read
it, this picture will make much more sense. 
Since my modeling skills haven't improved I still have to rely on other people
to do the work for me;p. From 3D Cafe I got the Chrysler building, the lamp on
the desk, the chair, the file cabinet, and the tract lighting. The drafting
table and desk are some simple models I made with CSG. The small table and
garbage can are both rotational sweeps. The papers are some squares I made in
Spatch and messed up with some noise. I got the lamp on the drafting table from
the Moray homepage (www.stmuc.com/moray). All I had to do, really was put
everything in the scene. That doesn't help my chances at finishing well, does
it? Anyway, this proved to be more difficult than I thought. At first I
couldn't get everything to fit in the cameras' view, hence the 2:1 aspect
ratio. I had some trouble with lighting, too. At first I used several
spotlights placed about where the tract lights are. This looked good except for
the fact that the lights didn't cover everything, so the bottom quarter of the
picture was black. Eventually, I ended up using a 10x10 arealight scaled up by
about 2000! This is because the Chrysler building is about 15000 Pov units
high, and to get the room to look at it the way I wanted, I had to keep it far
away. This meant the room had to be scaled HUGE to keep everything at least a
little realistic. Fog was also a problem. About six weeks in I got a new
computer. And a new, big, high-res monitor. The picture looked good on the
other monitor, but like crap on this one. It turned out that the fog, which was
already 11000 units away, was too close! I had to move it to 21000 away
otherwise the picture looked washed out. For those of you wondering, Course of
Empire is a band from my area. They are one of my favorite bands, or were, as
they broke up a couple of years ago:( 
I have to give a lot of credit to Gilles Tran. Without his help (and
permission:) this image wouldn't be possible. It should also be pointed out
that apparently Dr. Pynchon is a real person. I learned this after asking Mr.
Tran for his permission to use this character and he informed me of that. Also,
thanks to the thousands of people who give out their models for free on
websites around the world. Without you, my continued participation in the IRTC
would be in jeopardy;).