TITLE: Detention Hall
NAME: James Hodson
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: butty@pavilion.co.uk
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jhskool1.jpg
ZIPFILE: jhskool1.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PoV-Ray 3.00e

TOOLS USED: 
    No other tools used

RENDER TIME: 
    Parse 3 secs; Render 25hrs 8mins 4 secs; TOTAL 25hrs 8mins 7secs

HARDWARE USED: 
    486DX2-66, 8MB RAM A veritable dinosaur. It went into a coma a
few days ago but woke up just in time.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I first heard about PoV-Ray sometime last year and finally downloaded it around
10-12 weeks ago - soon after the winner of the "Flight" IRTC was announced. For
those with short memories, it was won by a jet powered ostrich; or rather,
that's what the winning image was.

At first, I used Moray to produce absolutely everthing but, after a while, I
decided to actually put a bit of effort into the subject. (I can't be the only
one who's read the help file and completely ignored it.) So, I deleted Moray
and began to try to get to grips, unsuccessfully, at first, with {s and #s and
other strange beasts. 'Needs must', as it is said and I began to achieve
results not too different from those I was expecting. (NB Moray is a great
program; I just felt that I had to remove it totally if I wished to progress.)

This image started as an experiment in halos. Having read section 4.8.5 of the
help file which shows basic halos in action, I decided to try for myself. My
first attempt looked a bit like the help file example - not really surprising
as I copied straight from there. So, I fiddled aroud with the various
parameters to see what happened until quite recently when I came across the
latest IRTC ("School") and decided to give it a go.

For some reason, I immediately thought of detention - a subject in which I was
very experienced some years ago - and, probably as I was messing around with
halos, an image of a desk surrounded by fire came into my head. How does the
brain work by the way??

The idea was to have the desk and fire as described floating on a raft in the
water with steep cliffs in the background. A series of other obstacles were to
prevent any possible escape from this fine educational establishment. Things
such as machine-gun towers came to mind. The sea and cliffs would have acted as
less tangible barriers - psychological barriers, if you like.

I then heard about #while #end loops in PoV and decided to chuck a couple of
these in, if only to see how they worked.

Unfortunately, my PC, for some reason known only to itself, decided to have a
rest a few days ago and has only recently woken up. I knew that the rendering
would take a long time so I had to remove a few of the *.inc files from the
scene to speed things up. The problem was then, the resultant image was nothing
like I had intended so I did my best to tart it up with the old amateur
photographer's trick: us a wide angle lens to give a wierd perspective.

The image is made up of simple primitives (mainly boxes and cylinders) with my
own textures, which I made up as I went along.

Anyone may use any part of this image, including the *.pov and *.inc code, in
any way they choose. Whould anyone really want to.

All in all, I a little disappointed with the final result. It isn't at all how
it was a week or two ago but it was re-written over a period of 18 hours or so
ance my PC had awoken.