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