TITLE: The Simplest Machine NAME: Matthew J. Sayre COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: desert-irtc@usa.net TOPIC: Minimalism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mjs_tsm.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.6 TOOLS USED: MS Paint (to transfer .BMP to .JPG), Photoshop Essentials (branding), MorayWin v3.5 RENDER TIME: 3h 11m 44s HARDWARE USED: Panasonic Toughbook CF-51, 1 GB mem, Intel Centrino, WinXP IMAGE DESCRIPTION: At the Stickville National Museum of Art and History, there is a monument of J. Albert Einstick, the discoverer of one of the most basic and simple machines in existence: the lever. Here he is shown moving a nodule of cooled Volcanic Taka rock. Later, he found that boiling water created steam, and when captured, could create pressure that could be put to all kinds of uses. This could be used from heating homes to the driving force behind massive public transport systems. Everything that is built or founded must have a solid base or it will collapse. Our technology today would never have been possible without the idea of the lever. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used MorayWin to create a scene and then used POV-Ray to render it. I read the title "Minimalism" and the first thing that popped in my head was the concept of the lever, the most minimal of machines. But how could I make it into a picture? A person moving an object seemed the answer. After some thinking I decided on a museum scene. I wanted to create figures in Poser and transfer them over to POV-Ray or Moray but I've been having problems getting it to work right and since I'm deployed to Iraq at this time, my free time is very scarce. I decided to use stick figures to go with the theme of minimalism. I wanted to make them posable, so I learned about Inverse Kinematics (IK), which basically means if I have a figure and I move the hand around, the rest of the arm will follow and bend like a real arm. Animators are familliar with this technique. I made one stick figure from scratch, set it up for IK, and copied it and posed each copy individually. I decided to have the statue man move a gigantic reflective ball so I could add more atmosphere and detail in the room. All the other exhibits in the room are more or less random objects. The floating green sphere with the clouds around it are meant to give a futuristic feel to the picture, even if it has a minimalist theme. I didn't create any new materials or textures for this picture. They are all stock materials from Moray. I did edit some of them or adjust a colormap to fit what I wanted.