EMAIL:         maarten_hofman@hotmail.com
NAME:          Maarten Hofman
TOPIC:         Old Technology
COPYRIGHT:     I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:         Weapon smith
COUNTRY:       USA (Originally the Netherlands)
WEBPAGE:       http://people.zeelandnet.nl/whhofman/jen
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
RENDER TIME:   34:18
HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 1.8 GHz

TOOLS USED:    
* Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (to convert to JPG/PNG and to create one of the height
                       fields)
* WinZip (to create the zip file)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Originally intended to be a torture chamber, I decided that a weapon smith
might be a better idea. I decided to make the composition into an exhibit, as
one of those example rooms in a museum. Some of the items are old, some of them
were made specifically for this exhibit. On the wall is an example of something
that would have been made here.

The image should be complete, and it might therefore be fun to move the camera
around yourself and look at items in detail or from a different perspective.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I like programming all the objects myself in the POVRAY scene language, which I
did again here. There were a number of issues, which are mentioned here with 
their resolution:

1. The walls. First I made them using a proper texture (bricks) but this didn't
   turn out very well. Then I tried to build the walls from separate stones. It
   worked quite well up to a certain point, but the result didn't have a really
   old feel to it. So I decided to create a wall using a height field. Placing
   the height field was a bit tricky as well, but once I managed to do this, it
   looked quite well. I tried various texture types, and settled for the 
   current one because of the nice reflections of the fire on it. One wall was
   kept in brick form, to indicate the wall that the museum would be on (you
   can see this wall in the reflection on the hood).
2. The anvil. Probably the most complex CSG that I made. It took quite a few
   hours to get everything right.
3. The old wood. The default wood textures of povray were insufficient,
   especially because one would expect soot and burn marks on it. This is why
   I changed them accordingly.
4. This is the first image that I made using radiosity. I tried other
   raytraces with it, but it usually made things worse. In this case, however,
   it made everything stand out better.

As with my other raytraces: the sharp shadows are intentional.