TITLE: "Hey mom, just a kiss from Baghdad !" or "Baghdad Bag-head"
NAME: Rene Bui
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: renebui@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.baudandbui.com
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: baghdad.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    pov-ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    pov-ray/moray 3.5 + plugins (Insert Code), hamapatch, amapi 3d,
poser 4, poseray, uvmapper, psp8.

RENDER TIME: 

Time For Parse:    0 hours  4 minutes  13.0 seconds (253 seconds)
Time For Trace:    5 hours  6 minutes  12.0 seconds (18216 seconds)
Total Time:    5 hours  7 minutes  49.0 seconds (18469 seconds) (640 x 960
pixels)

HARDWARE USED: 
    celeron 2,5 Ghz 512 Mo


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Lies and human tragedy of epic proportions.
As so many people, I was moved by the images of torture of Abu Ghraib's prison (
http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444 or
http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/ ), not only because
they're cruel, pervert and obscene, but mainly because they were indirectly
produced in the name of "freedom", "democracy" and as you know, the now very
famous bullshit of Mr President.
My entry is a sort of modern allegory as a reaction to this awkward speech
tending to make us believe that one can heal someone by beating that person.
The plastic sandals symbolize the ordinary Iraquies, the ones from the streets,
always ready to die, without even knowing for whom or for what. That's often
what is left of them after the bombs have exploded. And they also knocked down
the fallen  dictator's statue with these same sandals in an ingenuous and
pathetic way. I collected them as a bunch, the way the torturers from Abu
Ghraib tempted to do it with their victims, and the same way the Nazis did
before them with the corps and belongings of the deported jews (shoes, glasses,
wigs, clothes, etc.).

The ghost image (as a mirage) in the sky represents NYC and an Iraqui mother. If
you can't see the common point between NYC and that Iraqui mother, then you
can't see any better the common points between Saddam and Bin laden...

To conclude, evevryone's free of interpretation. Because if I had to explain
precisely by writing, what would have been the point of creating that image ?

I wish the best for the Iraqui people in the future, but there is one thing I
know : freedom without dignity is NOT freedom.
Rene Bui
PS: For an optimistic point of view of Baghdad please go to
http://baghdad-pictures.blogspot.com/

Thanks to Lydie Clark for the translation.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


- The sandal hill : I used the trace function on 3 invisible heightfields. the
sandal is a free mesh found on the web.
- People, clothes and props : as usual, poser/daz characters and some free
products (gloves, guns, helmet, glasses, seagulls, coils of razor wire) found
at http://www.renderosity.com/. 
- Clothes texture, bag-head and poncho : by me.
- Hair : by Kozaburo (http://DigitalBabes2.com).
- The twin palm trees and others : I used the excellent Pov-tree 1.5 by Tom Aust
(tree algorithm) and Gena Obukhov (Java programming).
(http://www.aust-manufaktur.de/austv2x.html)
(http://home.covad.net/~gobukhov/download.html)
- Smoke : based on the Rune's Particle System macro by Rune S. Johansen
(http://runevision.com/).
- Barbed wire : based on the Barble.pov - simple barbed wire demo by Jerry
Anning.
- The wall, the Palestine Hotel and other buildings : textured CSG.
- Air Force One : a free 747 mesh textured by me.
- Flags, ladders, turkey, oil can : some meshes made with Amapi or Hamapatch and
uv-mapped.
- NYC, the iraqui mother, the Al-Shaheed Mosque, the helicopter "Apach", the
scottish terrier dog and the girls' message : simple photo mapped boxes.
- Light : 1 pointlight for the sun, 2 pointlights with lensflare effect (flare
dispenser), 1 pointlight for the front girl hair (to resolve the dark artifact
problem).
- Radiosity is on.

Thanks to all these authors.