TITLE: Propaganda Poster
NAME: Tim Glover
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tglover@nettally.com
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: civies.jpg
ZIPFILE: civies.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.1, Paintshop Pro 3.11 (for conversion to jpeg)

RENDER TIME: 
    8.31 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dell 233 MHz PentiumII, 64 Mbytes RAM, Win 95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


9-11. As an American, I've grown up with these numbers meaning a place to call
to get help in an emergency.  Now they have a much grimmer meaning.

I think the thing that gnaws at me most about that day was the use of civilians
and civilian machines to kill other civilians.  Many have compared it to Pearl
Harbor but there is a significant difference.  Pearl was a military target
attacked by military machines in a true act of warfare.  9-11 was neither of
these.

Perhaps numerous military attacks on civilian targets have set the precedence
that civilian targets are legitimate targets of war.  Perhaps it's a small step
from this to seeing civilians as legitimate targets for anyone with a grievance
and resources to pull off such an attack.  If so, then our concept of
civilization has just died a little.

This entry is a propaganda poster against such targeting.  It is not
anti-American.  It is not anti-Islamic.  It's not even anti-Ben Laden. The
events remembered include Sherman's sack of Atlanta in the U.S. Civil War; the
slaughter of Native Americans at the Wounded Knee reservation; the Nazi-backed
bombing of Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War; the Japanese Rape of
Nanking, the firebombings of Dresden, Germany; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,
Japan; the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam; and "the Eleventh".

There are many others that I could have put in.  These are the ones I chose
because they seem to form a pattern - Sow and so shall ye reap. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Each new submission I've done lately has had a skill theme.  This entry is a
little different. For this entry, I was trying for a "look" and a little bit of
a message.

Not too long ago I saw some pictures of World War I propaganda posters.  This
entry was an exercise to re-create that look.

The twin towers are simple superquadrics.  Details are not modeled in keeping
with the poster style and to keep them more of a symbol.  

The airplane and skeleton arm are a couple of models I got a long time ago from
one of the public model repositories -- Avalon, I think.  They've been tweaked
and the arm has been re-posed (bone by bone, no reverse IK here!)

Texture for the arm was developed in Moray Texture editor to give a chalky,
bumpy surface like old, dried bones.

The texture for the airplane is a photo from GDIS (www.gdis.org) and is licensed
without cost for personal use. (See included "attrib.txt").  It is a photo of a
group of children waving and one of the most "civilian" shots I could find.

Remaining textures for text and background (a large sphere) are modified from
textures in the Moray texture library.

Shadows are turned off from most objects to give a poster look -- flat lighting,
like tempera paint.

The text list of past events are lighted with a spot light with intensity fading
with distance, giving the most recent event a whiter, newer look while the
events fade and grow dimmer with age (and distance from the spotlight).

Composition was tweaked until the placement of items drew the eye back and forth
across the image until finally ending on the message.