TITLE: The Prayer NAME: Maurizio Tomasi COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mt-pray.jpg ZIPFILE: mt-pray.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Linux TOOLS USED: - Red Hat Linux 7.3, kernel 2.4.18 with Gnome 1.4 - Emacs - The Gimp - XFig - Ghostscript - sPatch (under Windows95) RENDER TIME: Time For Parse: 0 hours 1 minutes 2.0 seconds (62 seconds) Time For Trace: 44 hours 39 minutes 1.0 seconds (160721 seconds) Total Time: 44 hours 39 minutes 43.0 seconds (160783 seconds) HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 64 MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A girl is praying in a church, alone. A light descending from the sky through a glass window shines upon the apse, giving the feeling that Somebody is listening to her. When I decided to join the IRTC competition, my purpose was to give a "positive" interpretation of the topic, by showing that absolute loneliness is a false concept (at least for a believer). I hope to have succeeded in this. The painting on the altar portrays Job mocked by his wife. I chose this subject because I think it is related to my interpretation of the topic: people thought God forsook Job as the girl seems to have been left alone by everybody. While the Bible says explicitly that God would comfort Job after having tested his faith, it has been a bit difficult to me to convey the feeling that God did not leave alone the girl. The cone of light coming from the sky has been my first idea, but I am not sure if its meaning is clear to everybody before reading these explanations. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is the first time I create a real image with a raytracer. My only previous attempt was a set of 48x48 icons for my Windows95 desktop (and that try was not completely successful...). A great help came from studying the images submitted to old IRTC contests: with regard to this image, I found some great tips in the code of "Alchemist Laboratory", by Jaime Vives Piqueres. The wall texture is a simplified (and slightly modified) version of Jaime's great wall texture. Let me apologize for the altar, which lacks a lot of detail. My first plan was to place the camera farther from the girl, so that the altar would have been smaller, and details less important. The little arches around the apse, the flowers in the vase, the vase itself, the girl, the kneeling stool, the benches, the statue above the altar and the little balcony columns are made with sPatch (under Windows). Every window is a whole isosurface object; mathematically it is the union of a box and a semi-cylinder (actually I did *not* use the simplest solution of a cylinder and a box because this gave me some problem when doing CSG). The picture frame and the "square" motive under the altar are height fields, as well as the altar top (above the picture). The frame looks a bit ugly, but I had no ideas how to improve this. The candles are simple cylinders with a transparent emitting sphere above them (this sphere contains a light source whose intensity scales with the square of distance). A macro places a set of candles with random height above the candlestick (made with cylinders and boxes). The same trick was used with the flowers in the vase: each of them is randomly tilted and rotated by a macro. The cone of light coming from the window is a simple effect which required a *lot* of time in the rendering phase. An area light is placed outside of the church and points toward the girl (that is, the two vectors defining the area light are perpendicular to this direction). Inside the apse there is a transparent box which contains scattering media. This is enough for creating the cone-of-light effect. The painting is "Job mocked by his wife" (1632 - 1635), by George de la Tours (1593 - 1652), one of the greatest painter of the XVII century (in my opinion). I scanned a reproduction of the painting taken from the catalog of a marvelous exhibition held in my city (Bergamo). The painting is not very clear in the rendered image; you can take a look at latour.jpg in the zip file. The beautiful window glasses are from the Chartres Cathedral (France); they have been made in the XIII century. The jpeg files in the zip file are window1.jpg through window5.jpg. The zip file contains every file needed to recreate the image. Enjoy! Maurizio Tomasi Bergamo, August 29th, 2002 P.S. Could somebody explain me why there are those bright dots around the second window (from the left)? I did not manage to remove them.