TITLE: Exhibit Three-oh-one
NAME: Charles Fusner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: cfusner@enter.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.enter.net/~cfusner
TOPIC: Physics & Mathematics
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cfexh301.jpg
ZIPFILE: cfexh301.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    MORAY, Paint Shop Pro, EVP (desktop publisher), pocket
            calculator, and some "HVM" (Human Virtual Memory -
            aka paper and pencil)

RENDER TIME: 
    14 hours, 49 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 150

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A typical weekday afternoon at the local science museum. Displayed
here is Exhibit #301: The simple catapult. The case contains a 
working scale model of these once fearful seige machines, showing
how something as simple as a counterweight rig could be used to 
hurl the projectiles that toppled mighty castle walls while in the
background, some papers looking like they were copied out of a
textbook recite the physics and the mathematical descriptions of
its operations.

I was extremely pleased with the final results of this project,
being my most photorealistic effect to date. Here are three points
you'll want to look for:
#1. The white marble texture of the wall - I have a real piece of 
white marble on my desk as a paperweight (left over from a 6th grade
geology project), and when I first looked at the so called White_Marble
in textures.inc, I shuddered. After considerable reconstitution, I
finally got a texture that just about exactly matches REAL white
marble.
#2. The text on the papers hanging in the background was put 
together in a desktop publisher and converted into a pair of GIFs
for image mapping onto the bezier patch papers. However, note that
scale diagram of the catapult on the lefthand page. That was part
of a nifty new technique I discovered for using POV's orthographic
camera in combination with Paint Shop Pro's "find edges" filter to
produce pretty good approximations of professionally hand drawn 
diagrams; other cameras and/or subjects would probably be useful
for making fake pencil sketches and maps/blueprints. (More experiemnts
are planned <bg>). You can't really appreciate the diagram fully 
from this camera distance, but I plan to include the full GIF's in
the source ZIP along with more details on the technique. It's worth
a look.
#3. The reflection in the display case glass. A transparent surface
that didn't reflect anything was kind of pointless. But simply
sticking in a roof, far wall, and checkered floor didn't exactly
look very realistic either. In the end, I carved a portal in the
wall, and added two potted plants and a marble bench so that the
reflection would seem more like a real museum hallway, even though
these scene elements appear nowhere but in the reflection!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Everything in the scene was hand modelled and placed, with 
one minor exception: the potted plants in the reflection. That one 
scene element, each constructed of a SOR unioned with one 
dozen bezier patches required MORAY to obtain the necessary control 
points. Other than that, nothing you see was not fashioned totally 
by hand.