TITLE: Overlooked
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: overlook.jpg
ZIPFILE: overlook.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Poser, Poseray, MS Paint, Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    16 hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1.6 GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Cast out and ignored by the society around him, an old man quietly works on
building his latest project.

...sometimes beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I didn't want to do just a landmark building, so I struggled with the topic for
several weeks (and almost decided not to enter this round) before finally
settling on a concept.

The person is a Poser model.  The coat was posed in Poser 5's cloth room.

Everything else was created in Povray.  Most of the objects are CSG, except the
papers, box and cards.

The papers and box are bicubic patches.  The texture of the papers is completely
procedural.  I used a slightly turbulent marble pattern for the lines of "text"
and a cube pattern to clip the text to create the margins.

The broken bottle was made by clipping a bottle shape with a height field to
make the neck and base parts.  The shards of glass are just intersections of
randomly rotated and scaled boxes.

The shopping cart is mostly cylinders and toruses (sp?).  I used a macro to
create a "squared torus" given the location and radius of the corners to make
the wire basket part.

I couldn't seem to get a brick pattern pigment and normal to agree with each
other, so I made the buildings from 2 boxes.  The outer box has a brick texture
with transparent mortar to let the second box show through and a wrinkle
pattern for the bricks.  The second box is slightly smaller to add depth to the
mortar.  Both have an overlaying dirt texture (which is used on almost
everything else in the image also).

The clouds are a scattering media with a wrinkle pattern.  The texture of the
moon (which hopefully adds a slight feeling of loneliness) is an image map that
I found on the internet long ago.  Hopefully, I rotated it correctly so the
right side is facing the camera.

The texture of the jack, queen, king and joker cards were taken from Pysol, an
open source solitaire game (makes me appreciate the GPL even more).  The others
were created by me in Paint Shop Pro.  Originally, the cards were individual
rounded boxes, but Windows couldn't handle the memory requirements of all the
textures (it rendered fine in Linux, although it used nearly 2GB of memory).  I
decided to try to reduce the memory requirements by making the cards using a
mesh.  At first, I used individual meshes with no luck.  So I tried using a
macro to put all the cards into one big mesh.  I put all the textures into one
file and moved the uv vertices to get the different cards.  Again, I had no
luck.  So I changed the macro to write the results of all the calculations to
an include file so that they didn't have to be made during the parsing.  It
reduced the memory use from 2GB to 176 MB.  The resulting include file was 15MB
and created 1451 cards (110276 triangles).

I didn't include the geometry or textures for the person in the source zip
because I wasn't sure if poser's copyright allowed sharing of the source files.
 I also left out the include file for the cards because it was so big, but I
did include the macro I used to create it. (card_mesh_maker.pov)  Feel free to
use, distribute, modify, and (hopefully) improve any of it in anyway you need.