TITLE: Dear John
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dearjohn.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (for signature and jpg
compression only)

RENDER TIME: 
    19 hr. 19 min.

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.4 GHz Thunderbird; 512 MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  I wanted to try a different approach to the topic, so I started thinking about
the effect loneliness can have on someone's life, and what it can lead to. 
This scene represents one man's solution to the loneliness he has felt since
his girlfriend broke up with him.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  The lampshade gave me more problems than anything else in the scene... I
couldn't find a way to get even a little light to pass through it without it
becoming somewhat transparent.  I think I spent more time tweaking it than I
did anything else in the scene, and I'm still not very happy with it.  The
shade itself is a simple hollow cone, and the bulb and pole are both lathe
objects.

  The wallpaper is a texture which uses the spotted pattern for both the pigment
and the normal, with repeating warps applied.  I created it within POV-Ray, but
then applied it as an image map to the walls to keep the normal from
interacting with the light in the scene itself.  The wainscotting is mainly
csg, although the gold trim is a somewhat simple sphere sweep.  The heating
vent, the shelf, and the items on the shelf are all csg, except the vase, which
is obviously a lathe object.  The chair is also entirely csg, and while it
could use some work, at least it doesn't look quite as hard and flat as most of
my furniture usually does. 

  And so we come to the main part of the scene, the table and its objects.  The
table is csg... just a few cylinders and numerous torii for the trim.  The ring
and its box are mainly csg as well, although I did use prisms for the diamond,
which can barely be made out.  The wine bottle and glasses are lathe objects. 
The gun is csg... interestingly, I've never seen a real gun before, and
couldn't find any good close-up pictures on the web, so my main goal was to
create something that looks like you could pick it up and shoot someone with
it, and which has some solidity to it.  The spilled wine is a simple blob
object, scaled very thin on one axis.  The letter is made of three bicubic
patches, done by hand within POV-Ray... fairly simplistic, but it gets the idea
across.  The text consists of text objects intersected with the bicubic patch
object... and yes, it probably would have been a lot easier just to image map
it.

  This is my first real attempt to tell a story through a scene... hopefully it
comes across all right.  
  
  As always, I'd like to thank everyone for their comments/criticisms on my
scene... I know it takes a lot of time and effort, but the comments I've
received over the past three years have been very helpful to me.  Any comments,
good or bad, are most definitely appreciated.  Good luck to everyone this
round!