TITLE: Computer As Toy NAME: Thomas A. Fine COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: fine@head.cfa.harvard.edu WEBPAGE: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/POV/pov.html TOPIC: Toys and Games COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: computer.jpg ZIPFILE: computer.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.50b TOOLS USED: vi, xpaint, and a desktop calculator. RENDER TIME: 45 minutes HARDWARE USED: Sparc Sun Blade 100 running Solaris 8 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I suppose this is a bit like an artist painting his thumb. This is based on my actual computer (and desk). When I thought about maybe entering this contest, I asked myself - "what toys do I like to play with"? Looking around my desk I see that there are many toys laying about (most not included in my image). And things that aren't really toys, that I play with too. But the toy I play with the most is the computer, and that's the idea of the picture. And I was entering a contest, which is certainly a kind of game. So why not document the toy I'm using for this game? You can see more of my thought process on the game entry in the piece of paper on the desk. These were my first ideas, quickly discarded. However, some of the ideas still have cameo appearances as objects on my desk. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used no real tools, just an editor and a calculator. Almost all objects are CSG. Many simple objects are rounded by making the object much more complex and using cylinders and toruses for the rounded edges. (Superellipsoids are only good if you are going to scale them fairly evenly in all dimensions, otherwise the rounding just looks wrong (to me)). The mouse is bezier patches, with values set by trial and error, and control points at edges lined up with the calculator, or in my head. The photo on the wall, and the photo printout hanging from the desk by a magnet are both actual photos of my actual desk. You can see the similarity, although obviously I chose to include only one monitor on my virtual desk. And my virtual desk is also much more tidy (and easier to render). The screenshot on the monitor was taken from my actual computer, fairly early on in the development. The calendar image map was made by editing a text calendar and grabbing it with xv. The IRTC logo was stolen from the IRTC web site, and widened with xpaint. The other two image maps were made with xpaint. I'm quite happy with the fabric for the pushpin board. I used Povray to render a bump map (see fabricbumps.pov in the zip file). Then I created streaks in both directions, because that's the way the fabric really looks. But then I layed the streaks onto the bump map using checkerboard, so that if you were to zoom in, the streaks would line up properly with the fabric bumps. Unlike most things, it looks better zoomed in than it does in this image. I didn't use as much contrast as I should have in the streaks, but it's still good. The fake wood desktop was made to look as much as possible as the real fake wood desktop. I noticed that the wood pattern was largely formed by lots of woody-looking streaks, so I used streaks as the pattern used to paint the wood pattern. I'm afraid it looks a bit more realistic than my real desk does. But only a bit. Radiosity was used, and two area lights. One hanging under the shelf above the desk. If I had time to make it look good, I would have lowered the camera so that you could see the actual glass over the light. The other area light is at the ceiliing height, the size of the real flourescent light fixture abouve my head. Antialiasing was also used (which pushed the render time from 45 minutes to 45 hours, due to poorly chosen settings). If I had more time, I would have added more clutter -- more papers, and more toys, and some books, and more. I would have put an image on my black mouse pad. I would have tinkered with the radiosity a little (or maybe a lot). I would have put more/better textures on things. The wall doesn't look right to me now that I've rendered it to full resolution. I should have jittered the light sources too.