TITLE: Haunted NAME: Hildur Kolbrun Andresdottir COUNTRY: Iceland EMAIL: hildurka@simnet.is WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Mystery COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: haunted.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3, Photoshop, Corel Draw RENDER TIME: Approx 2 hours HARDWARE USED: Amd Athlon 1200 mHz, 512 mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a quiet evening. You sit down with a nice cup of tea and a good book. An hour goes by and it_s getting late. The fire will soon be dying out and you start to feel chilly. This must be a draft, you think and glance at the clock. It_s just past midnight, time for bed. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, some books drop from their shelves, right in front of you. You jump off your chair in panic and step instinctively away from the books. In the process you knock over your chair. You feel the temperature dropping in the room. It now feels freezing. A couple of more books fall down on the floor. You try to reassure yourself. This is just a coincidence. I must have been careless when I picked the book from the shelf earlier. Still you can_t help gazing down the hallway, into the darkness. You try to resist it, but fear starts creeping in. You are not alone. Somebody or something is here. The inspiration to the layout of this scene is taken from the website dedicated to the Borley Rectory, "The Most Haunted House In England". www.borleyrectory.com The short version of this story: http://borleyrectory.com/misc/history.htm All copyrights are owned by it_s author, Vincent O'Neil, President, Borley Ghost Society, who kindly gave me permission to base my scene on material from his website. In short: There were reports from a lot of different people of paranormal activity in and around the rectory, that go a long way back. This includes almost every thinkable type of paranormal activity, poltergeist, throwing things, ghosts seen or heard, writing appearing on walls, strange lights in windows, etc. The list is endless. Finally the house mysteriously burned down in the late thirties, after being empty for some time. People have been investigating these reports for decades, trying to figure out what really happened there. My guess is that we will never know, it will remain a mystery forever. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Firstly I want to thank Michael Hunter for his invaluable insights during this process. The fireplace (lots of CSG_s) is loosely based on a photo from the rectory. It took a while to model but I liked the style, it_s a bit unusual. The pattern is a heightfield. The rest of the room is CSG_s, also the furniture, some items are rot sweeps and the floor is generated with the wall plugin in Moray. The lighting is mostly area lights, one inside the lamp, one in front of the fireplace to enhance the patterns, one faint dark blue in the hallway. I use caustics on the glass material for the lamp to cast more light on the wall behind it. I use radiosity with very low settings to keep the contrast between dark and light, count only 15. Lowest I_ve ever used. Finally I put a filter in front of the camera with a blue-yellow gradient to create a contrast of temperature. Enjoy!