EMAIL: el_profesorfr@yahoo.fr NAME: Thomas VIAL TOPIC: Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: 10F95 COUNTRY: France WEBPAGE: (none (yet)) RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 7 RENDER TIME: 5h 52m 53s HARDWARE USED: P4 2.26 GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is my first submission to the competition, so please don't be too demanding. Slightly off topic, but comments are welcome! That's a reminiscence of those days when, as students, we had the time to decimate the population of rosé wine bottles. "10F95" is the price they used to cost, before we changed to euro. The name of the wine is "Cabernet d'Anjou"; just after we gave up drinking it it was revoked its "appellation contrôlée". So we're a bit afraid that we let down gallons of antifreezing fluid (or worse). Whatever... this scene is pure fiction: we would not let a bottle on its own amid corpses of fellows. You can see it quivering with anguish, awaiting its fate! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All by hand with PoV's editor. The zip file contains everything; only the front side of the label (frontstick.png) was sampled down as the original file is more than 1 MB compressed. - BOTTLES See the include file that comes along. The overall shape of the bottle was designed by hand with a lathe object (nothing impressive, I had plenty of models!!). Making realistic objects was another story. It's a bit of thinking and A LOT of trial and error -- that's why the source file is poorly commented. I'm sure there are more elegant elegant ways to achieve the same, but I would not sit down and do it all over again. If you look at the shadow of the main bottle, you'll notice that the purple inner side is far too thin. I've tried making it realistically large, but it doesn't look good on the object itself (you don't see the clear "layer"). The labels are scans of a real one (again, no lack of source material). The "chiseling" above the labels can be found on real bottles, too. I used PSP to draw it, then with a touch of blurring it made a perfect normal map. - GLASS A difference between two quartics (the equivalent of quadric paraboloids; the higher degree makes the section closer to a square). - TABLE The wood texture is a... marble pigment. I'm very happy with this one, it looks fairly real. A couple of layers on top of the marble desaturate/intensify some areas, and another one yields sparse dark spots (ash, dust, whatever). - BACKGROUND A couple of remote shapes. Having a plain background would spoil it all, and since I wanted to go with focal blur anyway, thought a (very) coarse modeling could do it. - OBJECT PLACEMENT There is a flag that triggers the rendering of a grid on the table. I used this to sketch the scene with Paint Shop Pro, with the grid, the field of view, etc. It was then easy to draw objects here and there, and then to estimate (roughly) their location & orientation in the final scene. - FOCAL BLUR There's probably too much of it on the farthest bottles. But if you make it too low, you notice too clearly how ugly the background is. I would tend to think that if you push the background further away it gets more blurry - without impacting the objects on the table - but I found it very difficult to tune. It just seemed to have no effect so I gave up (can anybody help?).