TITLE: Before the First Concert
NAME: Veijo Vilva
COUNTRY: Finland
EMAIL: veijo.vilva@animal.helsinki.fi
WEBPAGE: http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/
TOPIC: surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: before.jpg
ZIPFILE: before.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    none

RENDER TIME: 
    12h (+am2 +r3 +a0.003, excluding image map and photon map
  generation)

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4, 2.4GHz, 1Gb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  The image depicts the feelings of a harpsichordist before her first
  concert. The harpsichord looks just strange, the coloration of the
  keys has been reversed, the legs are queer, the body colour yucky.
  The compositions she is supposed to play live their own life, some
  escape under the skirt board to emerge again, some are just racing
  each other, some take flight, some go around and around, one is
  simply adrift. The audience seems to be all eyes instead of ears,
  also the critic, who is a string music specialist more interested
  in his drink than harpsichord music, his left eye gone fractal out
  of anticipated boredom, even the paintings on the walls are gazing.
  After the concert, there is the balancing act of getting over the
  critique in order to commence the endless row of future concerts
  looming ahead with their new audiences and critics, an ever so
  feeble structure hanging in the air. The intarsia walls seem to be
  designed by a madman, the floor induces vertigo, the paintings on
  the wall are just plain surreal.

  Parts of the floor scene are reminiscent of some paintings of the
  Brueghels, almost anything could be lurking in the reflections, the
  bridging flutes only lack something crawling into them to be as if
  from the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, the balcony
  with the eyes on the benches stretches into distance like a runway
  with lights.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  This image started out as an image of a gallery -- my plan for an
  exhibition of my works for which there have been quite many requests
  after I gave one framed picture as a wedding present in late June.
  There was something surreal about one of the gallery versions, and
  when the theme for this round of IRTC was announced, I first played
  a little bit with quite different ideas but then started gradually
  modifying the gallery -- this is perhaps the thirtieth generation.
  I modified some of my old models for this scene -- they have quite
  many structural shortcomings, and I feel I learn a lot trying to
  reuse them, I mean I learn how they ought to have been designed as
  they keep falling apart when I try to modify them.

  The pictures on the wall have been built on image maps of some of my
  earlier works. The wall and floor textures are also POVray images,
  very narrow angle (0.2 and 1.9, respectively) views of two of my
  chess pieces -- these image maps were quite late an addition and
  took about five days to render at 7620x5080 (I also use them for
  high resolution versions of the main image). The intarsia walls
  are nice, of course, but the floor texture has quite an essential
  role supporting the imagery.
  
  For adequate visual contrast, the sky is very simple and almost
  diagonally balanced. The placement of many of the objects and the
  camera is quite critical for the desired visual and contextual
  effects. After some experimentation I used photons only for the
  picture frames.
  
  The Moir_ patterns formed by the strings of the harpsichord cannot
  be avoided at this image size, but the occasional brighter spots -
  which cannot be removed using any reasonable anti-aliasing parameter
  settings -- were invisible in a version of the image I scaled down
  from 7620x5080 (I resisted the temptation of submitting that version,
  though, as some people object to this kind of cleaning up of the
  images rendered for the IRTC).

  Parts of the development history of the image are shown at

    http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/gallery/galerias/