TITLE: Out shopping
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Insects & Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmshop.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmshop.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC


TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor.
    Sketches on paper - old technology, but it still works.
    DeskDraw to draw the two imagemaps used in the jar.
    Graphic Converter to convert the imagemaps to GIF.
    And Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.
REFERENCES:
    Collins Gem Guide to Insects by Michael Chinery (HarperCollins
0-00-458818-5)

RENDER TIME: 

    Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes   7.0 seconds (7 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    4 hours 11 minutes  37.0 seconds (15097 seconds)
        Total Time:    4 hours 11 minutes  44.0 seconds (15104 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb
DISCLAIMER: 
    No spider made an inadequate profit in the making of this scene.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    A spider shopkeeper takes delivery of more honey while a ladybird and
    a teddy bear wait to be served.  (Hey!  I only got three pairsa hands!)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The bear has been around unchanged for two rounds now, but I think everything
else is new, or modified.
The dress the bear is wearing was based on a dress I made for the Worship
round, with a cardigan added to it.
The shopping bag is mostly bicubic_patches - when I modelled it in close-up,
it was sagging more than it seems to be now, but I suppose it still adds
subliminal detail.  (The tartan texture is supposed to be the Murray tartan;
I made it a couple of months ago, but haven't used it in a scene before.)

The ladybird (ladybug in the US?) was modelled from the pictures and anatomy
in the book.  I left out the wings, as they weren't going to be visible.

The spider was originally more realistic, and was based loosely on the ladybird
code, as they're both arthropods.  It needed fairly extensive changes though,
as insects and arachnids are anatomically different.

The bees were also based on the ladybird code, and needed less drastic changes,
since all insects have a basically similar anatomy.  The wings are *gasp*
meshes - this may be the first time one of my IRTC entries has used a mesh
object; I can't remember doing it before.  (It's a reaction against previous 3D
programs I've used where everything had to be a mesh.)

Once I had all the characters, I built the shop.  Like the scenery in my
pdmfort entry for Fortress, it's meant to be a soft toy.  The shop counter, as
it's right in the centre of the image, got the most attention, and hence has
all its edges curved by use of CSG using cylinders.  The walls, doors etc
mainly use the same normal pattern from pdmfort to try to give a woven effect.
The lights are based on the ones used in pdmirtch in the History round, and
aren't trying to be soft toys.

The shop's floor uses the hexagon texture with three of the wood textures from
woods.inc (and that normal pattern) to give the impression that it's a
patchwork
floor using materials printed with a wood effect.  In other words, YES it's
meant to look like that :-) .  Well, almost.

Then I started on the goods sold in the shop.  The T-shirts from the Worship
round reappear, scaled in Z and hung on a newly-modelled coat hanger.  The
hanger and the rail it's hanging from are just off the right side of the
image in the final composition though.

The bolt of cloth the ladybird is trying to buy (maybe she wants to make up
some nice coccoons for her larvae?) is a simple bit of CSG, but it doesn't
look too bad.

The jars of honey the bees have just delivered are now available in two sizes;
the bees are discussing that with the shopkeeper, who's only had the larger
size before.  He's not convinced that the bears are interested in small jars
of honey :-) .  The shelves behind him are filled with the larger jars, with
a random rotation to stop them looking too regular.

On the counter are prints for sale of my highest-ever rated IRTC entry,
the teddy bears in the church.  That's also visible hanging on the door to
the stockroom, and on the wall, together with three other bear-related
entries that did reasonably well in past rounds.

Finally, since I had to get this finished before the last day, and it was
only taking 30 minutes to render 800x600 with anti-aliasing, I risked using
area lights instead of the point sources.  Only _after_ that finished did I
realise that there were no lights outside the shop, so the window at the
far left just shows darkness outside.  Oh well, that must be why the lights
are on in the shop.

That's everything - now _who_ came up with a topic which meant having to
pose six or even eight limbs on the figures?!?  (Ten if you count the wings,
but they don't have as many joints.)

Oh - and before you complain that the spider isn't preying on any insects;
did I say he pays the bees a fair price?  No.  Did I say he doesn't overcharge
the ladybird and other insect customers?  No, I didn't :-) .

ZIPFILE: (hopefully now unzippable on PCs without any problem!)
The main file:        
        pdmshop.pov
Macro and Include files
        BiCubic.mcr
        tedbearm.inc
        bearlist.inc
        beartex.inc
        material.inc
        toonspider.inc
        shopprops.inc
        softies.inc
Costume Definition Files for bears
        dress3.cdf
        tshirt.cdf
Image maps
        label.gif
        labelmask.gif
        pdmfort.png
        pdmhoney32f.png
        pdmirtch.png
        pdmmetal.png