EMAIL: panthus@xtra.co.nz NAME: Dan S Allsop TOPIC: Contrast COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Christmas Window COUNTRY: New Zealand WEBPAGE: 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).