TITLE: Pipe Dreams
NAME: Kyle Calderhead
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
EMAIL: kcalder@ic.edu
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: pipe_drm.jpg
ZIPFILE: pipe_drm.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PoV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    MS Paint (conversion to .jpg)

RENDER TIME: 
    46 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.5GHz Pentium 4 (256MB RAM), running Win98

DISCLAIMER:
This is a first entry, and I don't really expect to compete with the heavier
hitters.
However, I would really appreciate some _constructive_ criticism about how to
improve my
overall technique.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Never having done something like this, I tried to opt for something simple -- no
fancy
modelled patches, etc.  I've tinkered with PoV-Ray a little over the past few
months, but
this was my first serious "let's learn how it works" project.

So as I was saying, simplicity was key.  Tossing around the idea of "dreaming"
for a while, the
phrase "pipe dream" came to mind.  That kind of stuck, seeing as how pipes are
nice and geometric,
and the general idea was hopefully different enough that I wouldn't be completed
embarrased by
others who did the same thing, only _much_ better.  Once the literal side of the
brain kicked
in ("What _would_ a pipe dream about...?"), the rest was just a matter of laying
things out.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Nothing particularly fancy -- about the most complicated unit are the elbow
joints, which
are composed of a three-unit blob, along with the prisms for the bolts and
cylinders for the
ends (and also for clipping purposes).  Everything else is pretty
straightforward -- cylinders,
prisms, spheres, polygons, and one cone (for the fountain).  The water in the
fountain comes from
several "arches" (inspired by the PoV-Ray example of the same name) which are
obtained by the
difference of two paraboloids.

All of the textures are just standard PoV-Ray ones, with a good bit of tinkering
thrown in to
find something I liked (or in some cases, that I could at least live with --
particularly the
"rusty pipe" texture, which was okay, but never struck me as quite right, as
well as the
not-so-crumbled mortar where the pipes met the walls).