TITLE: Biohazard New Years The Future Looks Fun!
NAME: Murray Pearson
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: irtc@ahadesign.ca
TOPIC: The Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rosebowl.jpg
ZIPFILE: rosebowl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MacMegaPOV 1.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Illustrator and UserLand Frontier (for bezier definition of
the martini glass), Adobe Photoshop for downsampling and JPEG conversion of
final image ONLY.

RENDER TIME: 
    19 hours, 41 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Power Mac G4 500 MHz, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Hey, the future looks fun!
The Rose Bowl Lounge is a local watering hole and the source of the finest pizza
to be found in Edmonton. This poster was created for their New Years 2004
party; sure to be a fun affair for anyone in the neighbourhood.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

While hanging out at Rose Bowl recently I overheard the bartender grumbling at
the prospect of having to design the New Years Eve party poster for the bar. 
Not being the type of person to pass up some fun, I offered to do it for her.

I was offered the following suggestions: "Break Your Resolution", a biohazard
symbol and prominent billing for their (surely delicious) buffet.

I have used POV-Ray since 2000, and have found it a deeply satisfying activity.
Having been frustrated by conventional graphical 3D interfaces, I find it very
cool being able to sidestep the limitations of a GUI and simply describe the
ideas in my head, and leave the calculation to the computer! I have used POV in
design projects for several clients, so I stepped right into the project for
Rose Bowl.

The first step was constructing the biohazard symbol. I obtained an image of the
proper symbol on the web, sketched out the details on paper and constructed it
with CSG. Then I added a uniform Brushed_Aluminum backplane and the pearly
bubble and started working on the composition, adding in "new years eve" and
the copy about the buffet. Initially the display copy was black facing the
camera, but adding a white copy of the letters in a hidden location lit the
type up brightly through ior-induced total internal reflection.

At that point I decided the poster needed a more festive feel, so I changed the
aluminum plane to a cylinder behind the logo, and added a basic sky_sphere
(mostly a checker pattern, of course) which ultimately evolved into a starfield
interspersed with aurora-coloured and purple bands; the starfield is taken from
the standard Starfield4 texture.

The image seemed to lack drama so I played around with the camera, eventually
settling on an ultra_wide_angle lens almost 80 degrees wide (and about 100
degrees high).

Continuing with the festive theme, I added a martini glass from my object
archives. I had created this by measuring one of my martini glasses and drawing
a lathe profile in Illustrator, then running the .ai file through an
Illustrator-to-POV-bezier conversion utility I wrote in UserLand Frontier based
on Adobe documentation of the Illustrator file format. The resulting bezier
curve was lathed to create the glass shape; this lathe is captured by the scene
file. Ultimately this shape was given a media emission glow to give it the
sick, radioactive feel of the glass in the poster.

A test render turned out very dark, so the assumed_gamma and global settings
were added then. The exception was the high max_trace_level which was added
fairly early on (and manipulated throughout the design process).

Around this point I remembered the IRTC's current competition theme and said,
"why, this is the future!" I also thought the sick-fun feel of this image would
go over well. :^)

After some tweaking, like adding the black drop-shadows behind the type and a
few more lines of copy, I decided the image was ready for a final render. It
took 19 hours, 41 minutes on my G4/500 machine to render at 1760 x 2200 pixels,
for reproduction at 8.5"x11" for the final size. I have noticed that I have
become less strict about the 300dpi minimum for print since I started
ray-tracing. ;^)

The final posters (only five copies) were printed on my HP OfficeJet 5510
printer. Kim the bartender, and the first Murray alluded to on the poster,
think they are great. :^)