TITLE: The prison NAME: Marc Schimmler COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: schimmler@ica.uni-stuttgart.de WEBPAGE: http://www.ica.uni-stuttgart.de/~marc/povray.html TOPIC: Horror COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: prison.jpg ZIPFILE: prison.zip 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!!! :-)