TITLE: A Cynic NAME: Bob Franke COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: wordsltd@halcyon.com TOPIC: School COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING JPGFILE: a-cynic.jpg ZIPFILE: a-cynic.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for Windows TOOLS USED: POV for modeling and ray tracing PhotoStyler for copyright note and jpg conversion RENDER TIME: 1 hour 26 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133, 48Mb This is my first image for the competition and I decided to use it to make a statement about the conditions in some of our schools. The weapons returned sign reflects the legal frustrations in today's society. Well, enough of that... on to the image DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I wanted to make a gloomy broken down bombed-out building but soon found that my texture skills were not up to the task. I really admire those individuals who are so talented at creating new textures. I solved this problem by building a brand new school. In the interest of advancing the art of ray traced textures, I would like to see a competition topic of "old, broken and worn out". THE GRASS The grass is made of tiled pieces of sod. Each blade of grass is a mesh of two right triangles at 90 deg's to each other. The size is based on a blade of grass from my front lawn. The blades are randomly planted at approximately a 1/2 inch spacing. The tops of the blades are also randomly offset so the blades will not all be vertical. The pieces of sod were then tiled with each one randomly rotated on the Y axis at a 90 deg increment to avoid a checker board effect. After all of this, the grass looked terrible. It appeared entirely different on the opposite sides of the sidewalk. To fix this, I used the above concept with different scaling and density on each side. THE WINDOWS The window assembly includes an outer frame, lower and upper sliding frames and 16 panes of glass. To reduce the big sectional mirror effect, each pane of glass is randomly rotated on the z,y & z axis from 0 to .3 degrees. THE CHAIN LINK FENCE This is my favorite part of the image. I started modeling all of the parts to build a real fence, but stopped because this detail could not be seen. One section of the steel mesh is made of two pieces of wire, each made of a torus clipped by two 45 deg planes and two short cylinders. They are put together with a union with one rotated on the x axis at -3 deg's and the other at +3 deg's. When this section is tiled, a seamless weave is created, similar to a real chain linked fence. To really see the detail the camera must be moved closer. A FEW OF CREDITS Dan Farmer for his DMFDarkOak texture Jussi Kantola for his cloud texture The POV Team for POV and the included textures