TITLE: Christmas Window
NAME: Dan S Allsop
COUNTRY: New Zealand
EMAIL: panthus@xtra.co.nz
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dsaxdog.jpg
ZIPFILE: dsaxdog.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Microsoft Picture It Express for JPEG conversion.
            JASC Paint Shop Pro 3 for image map.

RENDER TIME: 
    43 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 500Mhz w/ Windows 98


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Inside and outside a shop window.  Make of it what you will.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I wanted to do a picture with a Christmas feel to it and when I had
the idea to have a toy dog in business clothes looking in at a
Christmas display with the same toy dogs I thought I had something.
Unfortunately people I have showed this to have all asked "So, where
is the contrast?", so it doesn't work as I thought it might.  I think
the contrast is an abstract of in and out/ desired and acquired/
learning and living in the real world - I hope people can see some of
this intention or find their own.
I have not included the dog in the source code because this was one of
my first character models and it has sentimental value to me.  It is
constructed from blobs and is based on a stuffed toy I have (to anyone 
attempting blob characters I recommend stuffed toys as they are quite
puffy and spherical by design).  I left in the Christmas hat which has
a #while loop to build steadily decreasing spheres rotated around a
central point to make the flopping over top.
For the lettering and frosting stuck to the window I made a #macro 
which builds a blob line randomly scaled and X positioned with an
additional loop to surround each component with little pieces of 
spray.  The curves for the R and S got their own code but every other
letter just calls this #macro with varying length, angle and position
variables.
I built a #macro for the background buildings as well.  It is just a 
box of random height with another box inside (with the window texture)
and a loop which differences the window slots until it reaches the 
top.  I added in some randomly positioned windows with the lit window
texture to break it up.  There is a row of buildings in the foreground
as well (the room is in one of them) to pick up the reflection in the 
ones at the back.
The plant is a random construction of a single hollow sphere, clipped
by a couple of boxes, and randomly scaled and rotated.
The gumballs are all individual spheres (4000 of them) randomly 
coloured and rotated around the inside of the glass ball and in a 
layer on top.
The mall, sign, bench and bin are all fairly simple primitive 
constructs (the bench is a cubic_spline) with lots of loops for the 
repetitive positioning of the holes in the roof, the railings and 
pillars, the bin cage, the bench seats and the lighting.  The sign
uses an image map I created in Paint Shop Pro.
The foreground window also has a loop for the little lights at the 
front (all up there are 40 lights in the whole picture) and a formula 
to randomly position the polystyrene snowballs.
I think it is quite hard to balance a picture which uses reflections 
as main elements (not least because without the window this renders in
about 15 hours and with is 43).  I cheated in that the window glass is
a clipped plane instead of a box (if you look at a true window
reflection there is the main reflection and a fuzzy edge where the 
object is reflected through the depth of the window as well - this
would have slowed my render to about 120 hours and I'm not that 
patient).  I think you can see the Christmas dogs okay but this level
of reflection makes the polystyrene snowballs in the suited dog's
trousers a bit intense (if anyone knows of a way to have reflections 
fade with distance in POV-Ray, as can be done with light sources, I 
would greatly appreciate knowing).