TITLE: A Twisted Prison NAME: Peter McCombs COUNTRY: U.S.A. EMAIL: pmccombs@xmission.com WEBPAGE: http://www.xmission.com/~pmccombs TOPIC: Surrealism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: twisted.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Moray v3.3 Wings3D 0.98.11c The Gimp v1.2 xfig PovTree 1.0/Tomtree.inc (Tom Aust, Gena Obukov) Lightsys.inc (Jaime Vives) 3dclouds.inc (Sascha Ledinsky) pcmhair.mcr (Chris Colefax) Public Textures by Jeremy A. Engleman RENDER TIME: Time For Parse: 0 hours 15 minutes 48.0 seconds (948 seconds) Time For Trace: 19 hours 22 minutes 49.0 seconds (68226 seconds) Total Time: 19 hours 12 minutes 54.0 seconds (69174 seconds)* *How does POV-Ray figure 19 hrs 12 minutes total? :) HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2000+ 512 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This started out as a chrome sphere on a red and white checkered plane; 36 source lines of SDL (2 objects, 1 infinite!). This is my attempt to make something interesting from a familiar scene. I probably run the risk of being a little bit redundant this round, but I thought that the old chrome sphere cliche was a good start for surrealism. There's a lot of meaning (intended or otherwise) in this image. See if you can figure it out. :) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: During the genesis of this image, the aspect ratio moved from the old 4/3 to the current 1/2 that you see. You might have to scale it down to fit the whole image on screen. I replaced the flat plane with a big sphere to suggest a non-infinite horizon. Fog was used to add depth to the atmoshpere, and a sky sphere provides the ambience for the scene. I wanted to make the chrome sphere interesting, and I started by enhancing the lighting with Jaime Vives' lightsys. This provided the area light for the soft shadows, and it can do a pretty good simulation of sunlight. I also added some basic radiosity settings to improve the ambient lighting in the scene. I went to Jeremy Engleman's Public Textures site to get some good stone textures. I used the Gimp to make the stone texture seamless, this way it can wrap onto a sphere without betraying the edges of the texture map. In order to create a convincing stone texture, I decided to make the stone sphere into an isosurface, where the function is based on the texture map. I took the stone texture map and reduced it to gray scale. The color version was then mapped onto the resulting isosurface. With the 1/2 aspect ratio, I needed some more content to fill up the image above the sphere. It was an ideal opportunity to use one of PovTree's Poplar models. The checker pattern was replaced with a dirt texture, and I recreated a checker board with some simple boxes with a procedural texture. The grass was done with Chris Colefax's hair macro and the compressed mesh stuff. I built the bench in Moray, with a height field for the arm rests designed in xfig. The textures are again from the public textures library. The pawns, belaying pins and pinrail, sheaves, beckets, strops and other block pieces were modeled in Moray. The block's hook was modeled in Wings3D. The ropes were the most technically difficult pieces. The big rope is a number of spheres rotated and translated along a spline. I used lots of vector functions and the trace() feature quite a bit to get the siezing on the rope ends. The smaller haul rope is a simple sphere sweep. The clouds come from Sascha Ledinsky's 3D clouds include. These are standard layered clouds. The output was converted to JPG with the Gimp, which was also used to add the title text to the image. Sorry about the lack of source files. I'll try and post it on my site once I get it all cleaned up. It really is quite a large package with all of the maps and objects. The final scene contained somewhat more than half a million objects, a bit up from the two that I started with.