TITLE: Broad Street
NAME: Tim King
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: timk@jtse.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.jtse.com/
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: storage.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Hash Animation Master '99 (v7.1j)

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro, POV-Ray, GIMP

RENDER TIME: 
    11 hours 20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 350MHz, 128MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


There's a haunted school, on Broad Street, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Yeah, well, so maybe it's not haunted anymore, I guess. In 1976 they tore
down the old building, which had been constructed in the 1700's over an
abandoned graveyard. In this old building...

The midnight janitor would religiously turn on each light as he entered
the school. Each one then remained lit until he made his egress. At this
time he would extinguish each light, in reverse order, until he reached
the front lobby. He would then turn off the last one, walk out, and lock
the door. Never would he remain in the building with darkness between
himself and the exit.

My father spent some time as a young man working for the Butler school
district. And he can attest to the strange noises and wierd occurances.
Someone walking down the hall whistling a tune, even when the building was
completely empty. Piles of dirt mysteriously moving from one side of the
room to the other.

I guess, now, the reality of the Broad Street school will ever remain a
mystery. But here is one possible explanation.

Here I am, with my flashlight, searching through a deep, dark storage
area. Wow! I bet no one's been back here in decades! I remember leaving
that box of old books around here somewhere. I wonder if it could've ended
up back... Hello. What's this?

(This project, aside from being a contribution to the IRTC, also serves as
a proof-of-concept for a free graphical adventure game, set in a haunted
school, that I'm currently working on. http://www.jtse.com/)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The scene was modelled and rendered in Hash Animation:Master.

I created the floor texture by modelling and rendering a simple panelled
floor using POV-Ray. I then touched up the texture with Paint Shop Pro.

The skull face was based on rotoscope images, scanned from the Color Atlas
of Anatomy (Rohen/Yokochi). I produced the texture for the skull, based on
the same scanned images, in Paint Shop Pro. In general, the result was
less than satisfactory. But since the skull, while a central part of the
scene, is only visible at a very small scale, it was sufficient. The model
and texture, however, were enhanced and modified as necessary to meet the
needs of this particular scene.

The cobwebs are a series of patches made out of a semi-transparent
materal. The pattern is fBM turbulence, stretched out.

The stone wall is a series of ball-like blob-like shapes, pulled out of
shape and connected to form a solid panel.

The flashlight beam is a combination of three overlapping klieg lights
(i.e., spotlights). The overhead lights are yellow orange, while the
flashlight beam is blueish cyan. This enhances the contrast of the skull
itself. These overhead lights are behind, on either side, and above the
camera, and they cast soft shadows from the unseen edge of the
drop-ceiling. There are also lights around the skull to simulate the
reflected light of the flashlight beam. While this is not, strictly
speaking, realistic, it enhances the eeriness of the scene.

I banked the camera 2 degrees to the right, to give the scene a bit of an
off-kilter feel. Of course, this is a breaking of the rules, except for
phycho thrillers, of which I thought this scene qualified. 8-)

Depth of field is an integral part of this scene. Unfortunately, AM99
v7.1j appears to render some of the edges of the boxes inappropriately.
Given that they are out of focus, all box edges should be blurry. In some
areas of the image, especially near the center, the edges even morph into
and out of focus. There may have been better ways to arrange the boxes to
minimize the effect of this phenomenon, or otherwise to hack around it,
but time was of the essence, and I didn't catch the problem until late in
the game. C'est la vie. If a bug fix for this problem is released, I may
someday re-render the scene, for posterity's sake.

Finally back at my Linux box, and back in my element, I used the GIMP to
add my signature. 8-)