EMAIL: schimmler@ica.uni-stuttgart.de
NAME: Marc Schimmler
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The prison
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.ica.uni-stuttgart.de/~marc/povray.html
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1e
TOOLS USED: gimp, kolors.inc by Uncle Ken, xv, paper & pencil
RENDER TIME: about 2 hours
HARDWARE USED: development -- Pentium 90 with 48 MB ram
               final render -- SGI O2 with 196 MB



IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I started this pic just with the beginning of September, finding no time
before to model something for this one year event (at least I have submitted
every stills round last year). I was thinking about something that really has
some horror value without being to obvious. I don't like splatter movies and
allways liked the kind of stories H.P. Lovecraft wrote having it's own kind of
horror. I wanted my scene to contain some ambient horror based on the primal
fear everyone of us knows like the dark, the silence, deacy and everything that
connected to it. While playing with colour gradients exported from the color
gradient editor from GIMP I found a suitable rust texture and an idea was
born. 

A future prison of titanic dimensions, rotten and wet
... dark. Searchlights flashing through a great hall with endless anonymus
catwalks. Uncountable prison cells and not a soul to be seen. And then a
unknown noise ... like thousends of tiny feet running. You turn around a
corner and find the remains of another human soul. Just then you see in the
light of the dim neon lights the flood of RATS coming to get ... YOU!  



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Hand made. T&E, some graph paper and pencil  and a lot of patience. The whole
scene uses CSG. The gridwalks are made of superellipsoids and boxes while
everything else uses simple elements connected by loops and/or macros. The
detail of modelling is sometimes lost in the scale but I believe I can say
that the it is most of time quite high. The rats, the skull and the spine are
modelled using blobs. Don't ask me how to model with blobs ... I just did it
and it has been quite fast but I can't say that theres a method to it.
 
This has also been the first time for me to use media. It also worked quite
fine for me thanks to the tutorials that can be found in the web. I turned the
media interaction for the gridwalk light sources off for artistic reasons.
At reasonable distances I exchanged the higher detailed objects by dummies
without losing quality, IMHO.
Everything has been modelled exculsively for this event.

I'd like to thank Mick Hazelgrove for his helpful comments and the folks at
news.povray just for being there. 

BTW, Happy Halloween!!! :-)