TITLE: The Devils NAME: Maurizio Tomasi COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78 TOPIC: Decay COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mtdevil2.jpg ZIPFILE: mtdevil2.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 for Windows TOOLS USED: - Paint Shop Pro 8.0 (creation of height fields and image maps, JPEG conversion, title) - Poser 4 - PoseRay 3.0.1.271 - sPatch 1.5 - SplinEditor 1.2 (http://www.flashnet.it/users/fn027571/spil/index.html) - UVMapper 0.25e RENDER TIME: Time For Parse: 0 hours 0 minutes 55.0 seconds (55 seconds) Time For Trace: 2 hours 47 minutes 42.0 seconds (10040 seconds) Total Time: 2 hours 48 minutes 15.0 seconds (10095 seconds) HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image was inspired by the novel "The Devils" (published in 1871) by Fedor Michailovic Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). The story takes place in a small russian town, where old local notables lead a decadent and superficial life, propagandizing materialistic ideas and ironizing about moral and religion. Suddenly, a number of young men appears, coming back to the town after having wandered through Europe and America and bringing new political theories and religious ideas (the "devils"). These ideas sound new, smart and high-minded to the majority of the citizens, which begin to follow these people in their thoughts and actions. However, in the development of the novel these ideas are pushed to their extreme extent and cause a burst of terrorist acts: at the end of the novel the town is devastated by murders, lynchings and fires. "The Devils" is one of my best beloved books. It shows that decay does not necessarly lead to a quiet and slow death (in a moral sense), but even to violent destruction. This final fate is almost unforeseeable in its preliminary statements, since it can be caused even by high humanitarian ideas, if they are not based on christian pity and charity. This can be read as a warning of Dostoevsky about Russia's fate in the XX century (in the second half of the XIX century many terrorist attacks were committed in Europe by anarchists and radical socialists). But the value of this book does not lies within its historical context only. In fact, apart from having deep links with the present day too, "The Devils" is a great study about the Evil: the novel is full of characters which represent its many faces. For my image I chose to portray Stepan Verchovensky, which is the character most closely related to the theme of "decay". He is a literate and the father of Piotr Stepanovic, one of the most treacherous and demoniacal characters in the novel, constantly longing to determine "the breakdown of abstract structures" like society. The book suggests that the son was let free to join his radical ideas because of his excessive freedom in his younger years, since his father never cared about him nor his education. In fact, Stepan is an egocentric man which does not care about anybody but himself. He and the other parents in the novel have a great responsibility for the horror described in the last part of the story. By letting the old moral and religious values decay they unintentionally prepared the road to the political extremism of the opportunistic and cynical younger generation. To better describe Stepan Verchovensky's contradictory character, I have chosen a list of quotes from the book (my translation from the italian text). "He declared his complete agreement with the uselessness of the word `fatherland', he applauded the theories about the bad influence of religion, but he declared loudly that Puskin was more important than a pair of shoes, a lot more important." (Part I, Chapter I, Section V) "About his son, Stepan Trofimovic Verchovensky met him two times in his whole life. The first time was when he was born, the second in Petersburg, when the young boy was going to enter the University." (Part I, Chapter I, Section VI) After the first riots, Stepan is suspected to have inspired them and a police perquisition in his house is ordered. Although nothing was found there, Stepan is very frightened. "And suddenly he started crying warm tears. A flood of tears. He covered his eyes with his red foulard and sobbed, sobbed feverishly for five minutes. I was astonished. This man, which gave us propecies for twenty years, which was our preacher, our patriarch ... , this man suddenly sobbed, sobbed like a kid which has done a trick and is waiting the teacher with the stick to punish him. ... That absolute ignorance of everyday life was both pathetic and disgusting." (Part II, Chapter IX) "`And I do declare', cried Stepan Trofimovic Verchovensky , in the last step of exhaltation, `I do declare that Shakespeare and Raffaello are far higher than the freedom of servants, higher than the principle of nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the young generation, higher than chemistry, almost higher than the whole mankind, since they are the fruit, the real fruit of mankind, and perhaps the highest fruit that can exist!'" (Part III, Chapter I, Section IV) This character seems to be a simple-minded good old man, but after having read the whole novel it is impossible to avoid thinking that the horror described in the second half of the novel is partly due to his inability to "live", i.e. to act in the right way. I tried to portray this ambivalence in my image, which shows Stepan Verchovensky in his studyroom. To a first sight, the scene seems paceful and quiet, and almost nothing recalls a sense of "decay". But note that Stepan is so concentrated on his literary works that he turns his back to the observer and does not welcome him: he is not happy when somebody is visiting him (except when they praise him). The only things that can make him feel spiritually pleased are some beautiful works of art: this is the reason of the presence in his studyroom of paintings, statues, a decorated harpsichord and so on. And, meanwhile, through the dark passage the devils are already entering the room... The image uses many whitish shades, but white is not used here as a symbol of purity: it is instead the color one would found in a sepulchre, the "turris eburnea" where Stepan seems to be buried from the very first page of the book. A number of objects are implicit references to death: the clocks and the statue with the hourglass (they witness the passing of time), the dead butterflies in the theca, an old-fashoned harpsichord with two keyboards (in the XIX century these musical instruments were considered to be antiques with no musical use: this explains the lack of music scores and a chair in front of it). DEDICATION Questa immagine e` dedicata ad Angelo. Complimenti per la laurea, ed i migliori auguri possibili per la tua nuova, grande e bellissima avventura da un amico su cui potrai sempre contare! Maurizio DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: * Light In order not to increase the rendering time too much, I decided to use no radiosity. It was a bit difficult to choose the right light source settings, but finally I found an optimal configuration: - One light placed to the right (main light); - One shadowless fill light to the left; - One shadowless light placed near the observer. Every light is an area light which follows a power law, using carefully chosen values for the "fade_distance" and the "fade_power" parameter (actually, the first and the third light use the standard inverse square law, while the second one uses a fourth power law). * Floor A box repeated many times with six textures which are randomly chosen for each tile. The pattern is created using the same Scheme program ("parquet.scm") used in my previous image, "The Turn of the Screw" (May-June 2003 IRTC round), but with some little changes (the most notable is that now the pattern is rotated by 45 degrees and a new clipping algorithm is therefore used). This new version of "parquet.scm" is included in the ZIP file. Note that now it requires PLT Scheme instead of Guile. * Walls The image is one of the standard backgrounds included in the GNOME Desktop Environment 1.4. * Writing desk and chair Basic shapes, CSG and lathe objects (desk legs). The latter were created using SplinEditor, a nice program by Alessandro Falappa. * Inlays All the inlays are monochrome images used in a material_map, with two procedural wood textures (see file "chair.inc" for an example). * Stepan Verchovensky A simple Poser 4.0 model. I tried to follow Dostoevsky's description of Stepan: "the dress was elegant and characteristic: a black overcoat with long tails ... and hair reaching his shoulders. He was brown, and only recently his hair began to get gray." (Part I, Chapter I, Section IV) Hairs use a freeware texture found on www.renderosity.com; to apply this texture, I had to do an UV remap using UVmapper, since the Poser model has ugly distortions in the uv-mapping above the neck. * Hourglass Statue, book-ends Poser models. The hourglass was created with sPatch and imported in Poser as a DXF object (using the dxflayer export plug-in). * Harpsichord Made with basic objects (boxes, cylinders and a cubic_splined prism for the curved sidebelt). The landscape on the cover is taken from the photo of a XVII-century harpsichord rebuilt in the late XIX century (now kept in the Metropolitan Museum of New York). * Clocks Hands are rotated according to the functions defined in "clock-func.inc". Time of day is specified once in "mtdevil1.pov" (see the declaration of CurrentTime) and used for each clock definition. The pendulum clock is made by basic shapes (boxes, sphere sweeps and prisms) and height fields (bottom decoration and the pendulum, which is barely visible). The clock on the writing desk is taken from my "Sewing Machine" (Jan-Feb 2003 IRTC round), using a different texture and the clock functions mentioned above. * Door The panels are obtained by differencing the main body (a rounded box) with six pyramid bases. These have a greenish shade which is the same as the skirting-board. Note that the door is slightly shorter than it should be: with the "right" size it would seem too much long (a perspective effect caused by the direction of view, which is not perpendicular to the facing wall). Please do not blame me! I have heard that Leonardo did similar corrections in his paintings. * Paintings The two paintings on the left are two early works ("Conversation", 1870s, and "The Letter", 1873) by Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), an italian painter which studied in Paris. I think Stepan Verchovensky would have liked the vacuity of these works. Above the harpsichord there is the portrait of an unknown lady I took from a book about antique dealing. Every frame is an height field. The starting points are hand-made images which were scanned at a very high resolution and modified in Paint Shop Pro (*heavily* modified!) * Chest of drawers (It is placed in the dark room: you can see its silhouette) This was taken almost literally from my image "The Turn of the Screw" (May- June 2003 IRTC round). Maurizio Tomasi October 2003.