TITLE: Kitty's New Friend
NAME: Discord
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tina@tezcat.com
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sillykit.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay for Windows v3.1a

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro (height field, conversion to JPEG)
            Pen, pencil, and lots of paper

RENDER TIME: 
    14 minutes, 50 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 150, 32M RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The kitten finds his way up onto the dresser and is arrested by his
double in the mirror. 

_Where did the new kitty come from, and will he play with me?_

This is by far the most complex image I've ever put together. Although I
actually played with POVRay some in fall of '97, I didn't have a _home_
machine capable of running it (well, not really) until this year, and I
haven't spent much time doing rendering. I love it, I just have too many
hobbies and not enough time.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


When I saw what the new topic was going to be, I actually got the idea
pretty quickly. It probably didn't hurt that my cat was in the room doing
cute things at the time. :)

Originally, I was just going to do the room and the dresser and a bed, so
the mirror wasn't just reflecting wall. I spent the most time on the cat
at that point (not the version in this picture), working with it until it
was recognizably a cat, at least. The finished product bugged me,
though... it just was _off_ somehow.

Then I got to thinking it might be cool to put a window in the room for
the mirror to reflect, and maybe more furniture. So basically I started
over again. First, I did the outdoor stuff -- just a hill and the sky and
the ground. The sky, after last time's admittedly not particularly good
attempt, I managed to get satisfied with pretty quickly. Height fields
still confuse me but this time I managed to figure out how to do a
greyscale image using sunburst and radial fills so that I could make a
relatively decent hill. There were some scattered rocks originally but you
couldn't see them through the window so I took them back out. Then I stuck
a fence in (that was simple) just so there was _something_ else out the
window.

I worked on the cat next, using my original drawings of cylinders and
spheres but modifying them a bit; the rest of the blob production was
pretty much trial-and-error -- I _sort_ of understand how it's working but
not enough that I get things right the first time, or even the third or
fourth, generally. But I finally got it to the point where I was
relatively satisfied with it. There are flaws in it, particularly as far
as the face goes, but it's getting better. I do really wish I could figure
out a better combination of textures to make it look furry.

Most of the room was simple. The bed is basically just a box with some
squished spheres for pillows, the headboard two boxes (one clipped by an
ovoid), the posts lathes, of course, and the dresser and nightstand just a
bunch of boxes stuck together the right way, plus the knobs which are
cyliners and lathes... easy enough, since I plotted out the sizes on paper
first and was working 1 unit=1 foot. The two things that I had to play
with a lot were the window and the mirror, particularly the mirror.  The
walls are just boxes, with (thicker) one with a hole cut out for the wall
with the window. There's also a door, actually, but you can't see it at
this angle (when I made it, I wasn't sure where I was putting the camera
for sure).

Light level was something I had to toy with, too. There are two light
sources:  the sunlight outside, which I had to play with the positioning
for to give me some light through the window at a level consistent with
the color of the sky (I hope) -- anyone got some hints on that, by the
way?  -- and a flash-bulb at about the position of the camera (actually
just slightly away from it) with fade set (distance 4.5, power 1.9).

The window was, originally, just a pane of glass, which I guess I could
have left it as but decided finally not to. Rather than do a typical frame
window, I have a sliding window, so there are actually two panes of glass,
slightly apart from one another, one of which is slid slightly open. The
window has a lot of pieces, therefore, although less than it could if I
was modelling them off _my_ sliding windows...

I upped the max_trace_levels to 6 after getting a rather dark patch
between overlapping window sections.

After my original attempt at a mirror which both seemed to have problems
with changing the light level of the image and changing its color, I
finally gave it just a _tiny_ hint of both diffuse and ambient (.05 each)
and setting its reflection at .9 instead of 1, along with coloring it just
off pure white (I'd made the mistake before of using a clear color for
it...)

Lastly, at one point I'd considered trying to put dust in the air via
media for the sunlight to interact with (leading to a render time of 15
hours, and that was before I changed the window, no less) I finally
realized I just could not get it realistic and left it out. Speaking of
things I wouldn't mind some hints for... although earlier attempts at
trying to make it work gave me some cool surrealistic results, so I may be
playing with it a lot more soon.