TITLE: Refried Dreams NAME: Simon de Vet COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: sdevet@istar.ca WEBPAGE: http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: refried.jpg ZIPFILE: refried.zip RENDERER USED: POVray Superpatch TOOLS USED: Moray (with many plugins), Rhino (demo), Adobe PhotoDeluxe (for imagemaps, heightfields) RENDER TIME: 4h10m (more or less) HARDWARE USED: Pentium 266 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I am a great fan of Science Fiction, but I was born well after the hayday of classic SF. This image is a tribute to those days. A little background: The 1950's were an era when SF bloomed. There were dozens of magazines out there, all pulp, most pretty horrific. They all had awe inspiring names like "Amazing Tales", "Strange Worlds", "Weird Tales", and the like. My magazine, "Unbelievable Science Stories" is a tribute to these days of pulp. Browsing a number of online archives, I noticed a pattern in the cover art. They all featured terrible monsters on a dark red background, bland grey planets on bland grey backdrops (printing quality was lousy back then), or female space women, wearing giant fishbowl helmets, and very little else. These covers were usually yellow. :) These stories always featured gallant scientist/adventurer heroes who saved the day with scientific knowledge and terrible dialogue. Space operas, and space westerns ruled. Sword fights in orbit, gunfights on the moon. The chickens from planet Ziploid (I'm not making this up). Aliens with tentacles. At the same time, there was an overtone to the tales. The cold war raged, and people lived in fear of the "Reds". This was often a feature in the stories, with the aliens represented as evil invaders. The bomb made science suddenly much scarier, and the stories reflected this, whether through more scary science, or happy, utopian science. This is what my image represents. I am contrasting the colourful, unbelievable pulp worlds of SF with the grim, and very real, colourless cold war. Hence, a little reading material for the long wait in the bomb shelter. BTW, about half these stories were written for the sole purpose of having a bad pun. Alien space chickens who were conditioned to cross the road "to get to the other side." The floating city of Atlantis sinking under waves of fliers. With the theme of my image, how could I resist a title of "Refried Dreams"? :) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image evolved, dramatically. My original idea was one that never made it to the Imaginary Worlds round: a magazine store front, in balck and white, reflecting a city of tomorrow, in colour, in the window. Then it became a colour postcard of the city of tomorrow, in colour, laying in a gutter. Finally, the idea of a bomb shelter came to mind. I also discovered the demo version of Rhino, and fell in love. I will be buying this soon. The magazines, the spoon, the sign, the cans, the car, the shelf brackets, the can opener, and the beans featured on the cans were all made in Rhino, and rendered in POV, through Moray. The bricks are superquadratics combined with a very high resolution height field for the mortar. The shelf itself is CSG, made with the Rounded Cube plugin that came with Moray. The objects were textured with Moray, for the most part. Shiny objects were given slope dependant reflections with the superpatch. The magazine pages were scanned from Issac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (Issue one. The white line visible is a cigarette ad). The cards were also scanned. The magazines were given cover image maps based on rendered images, as was the can label. The whole thing was rendered in the Superpatch, using radiosity. The zip file includes the .pov, .ini, and .inc files used, as well as the magazine covers and can label maps (since I'm proud of them, and there's a lot of details you can't see in the pic) I didn't include any of the models made in Rhino, or and heightfields, since they are very large. If you are interested in any files not present in the zip, send me a message, and I'll be happy to give them over. Thanks go out to: Alex Magidow, for solving a problem that caused my pile of magazines to become a pile of of can openers. (!!) SF, for the inspiration The IRTC mailing list, for ideas, discussion. povray.binaries.images for comments on an early version, and many good ideas. The folks of #povray on IRC, for comments on an even earlier version. Kibo. Achimedes Plutioium, King of all Science!