TITLE: Optimism & Pessimism
NAME: Ryan Bennitt
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: ryanbennitt@lycos.co.uk
TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rb_halff.jpg
ZIPFILE: rb_halff.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Silo

RENDER TIME: 
    Parse 1s, Photons 7m44s, Render 18h23m14s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 3200+

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

It's the age old question, is the glass half empty or half full, are you an
optimist or a pessimist? Personally I can't stand such questions, the glass is
quite clearly at 50% capacity.

Some might say a wine glass represents something expensive. In comparison a
plastic table represents something cheap.

Now look at the table surface itself, rough strips rise like islands from the
smooth channels separating them.

Turning to the sky ask yourself this, is the sun rising or setting? Are we
therefore facing east or west?

Now look across to the moon. Are the sun and moon opposites? One emits light,
the other does not. One is unbelievably hot, the other cooled long ago. One
orbits the earth, the other is itself orbited by the earth. You might say one
represents day and the other the night.

The optimist in me says all these other opposites were planned, the pessimist
says I only found them after I looked at my own creation. Which do you
believe? Your answer should be the same as for the first question.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

There are so many opposites to choose from, on and off, rich and poor,
presence and absence, real and imaginary, the list goes on... Father Ted's
classic "small/far away" joke would have been fun. However the idea that most
struck me was one that did not require displaying two objects for visual
comparison. Instead I've taken the minimalist approach and combined the two
opposites into one object for mental comparison.

I started off with a line drawing of half a glass in Silo for which I wrote a
custom point array export plugin to export the data into POV-Ray. This was
then lathed into a glass in POV-Ray.

Similarly I created another line drawing of the wine in the glass, with a
rippled surface and exported this into another lathe.

Choosing a background was the next step. I was originally going to place the
glass in a dining room on a polished wooden table. However, in trying for an
opposite, I placed it on plastic garden/patio table to contrast expensive with
cheap.

Obviously this furniture belongs outside, which required me to present an
outdoor scene. Some time ago I played with simulating atmospheric scattering
in POV-Ray. Taking some of this code and hacking and slashing it into shape I
was left with a setting sun in an empty sky.

I needed a counterpoint to the sun. Clouds are tricky and wouldn't fulfil the
topic, but the moon would be simpler and provide something to compare with the
sun itself. The positioning of the sun and moon easily provided the classic
crescent shape.

Finally I needed something for the glass to reflect. Going back into Silo I
put together a couple of walls of a whitewashed house with windows and sliding
doors and a terracotta patio, nothing complex as they only needed to give an
impression of something in the glass, but the effect is there.

After some tweaking of light levels, reflections and photons the scene was
complete. The greatest challenge was achieving a believable scene given the
low angle of the sun. It also took me ages to fix a bug where half the wine
was appearing black, which turned out to be because it was intersecting the
glass. Quite frustrating when you are getting close to deadline and would
rather be adding more to the scene. I would have liked to increase the
resolution but time was pressing.