TITLE: Ideology
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ideology.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.1; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (for jpg conversion and
signature only)

RENDER TIME: 
    35 min 3 sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.4 GHz Thunderbird; 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 
  This is meant to represent the aftermath of a battle of ideologies.  I'm not
sure how well it comes across in the scene itself, but I wanted to portray a
Kent State-like situation, where the peace-and-love 60s mentality comes into
conflict with the military "might makes right" ideology.  As I see it, the
scene takes place at some sort of peaceful demonstration, with the military
police on hand to make sure it remains peaceful (by whatever means necessary,
apparently).  A demonstrator becomes involved in a head-to-head confrontation
with one of the military men, and after a heated exchange of words, ends up
thrusting a peace symbol medallion into the man's face.  Taking this as a
physical threat, the military man puts an end to the situation by shooting the
demonstrator. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  In a word, blobs.  Most of the objects in the scene are created from blobs
constructed of numerous spherical components placed entirely by hand through
trial and error.  The hand, shoes, and pants legs are all blob objects.  The
wrinkling on the knuckles is done using negative components, and didn't turn
out nearly as well as I had hoped, but after tweaking them a few hundred times,
I just gave up.  The pants leg use a quilted normal to simulate the effect of a
weave, and I like the way that turned out.  The peace symbol medallion is pure
CSG, as is the butt of the rifle.  The sidewalk blocks are also CSG, with a
heavy granite normal.  The spots of blood consist of three separate very thin
cylinders, using textures that mix transparent and opaque sections to create
the irregularities.

  I wanted the lighting in the scene to create very strong, dark shadows, so I
used a single light source for the entire scene.  

  (As always, comments/constructive criticism definitely appreciated.)