TITLE: Surprise
NAME: Rick Montgomery
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: rickm@mac.com
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: surprise.jpg
ZIPFILE: surprise.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray Mac 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Mac MegaPOV, OmniGraffle, GraphicConverter

RENDER TIME: 

        Main image:          1 hour 30 minutes 52 seconds
        Old Maid card image: 1 minute 59 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    PowerMac G4 dual 867MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        Jeremy moved all his chips into the pot, confident the river card had
not helped his opponent.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        This project started when I was toying with the idea of building a real
Texas Hold 'Em table. I started on Jan. 17, and a couple of days later I
noticed that the current IRTC topic was "out of place." What could be more out
of place, I figured, than having a card from a children's game show up in the
middle of a game of Texas Hold 'Em?
        The table is a blend of several poker table designs I found on the World
Wide Web. The design was sketched on paper and transcribed into POV syntax.
It's a CSG object made up of unions and differences of boxes, cylinders, and
toruses.
        The cards are also unions of boxes and cylinders. The card indices use
the Rockwell font from Microsoft. The pips on the cards are prisms which were
sketched on paper and then modeled using Mac MegaPOV's prism editor. Rather
than lay the printing on top of the card as a layer of ink, I inlaid it into
the card. Either way would have worked, but I wanted to play with doing inlays.
I had used a variation of the same technique to put the edge dots on the poker
chips. Then to add a little detail to the chips, I used the same heart, club,
spade, and diamond prisms to inlay the suits around the centers of the chips. I
went ahead and defined face cards, but the design was too intricate to build
out of prisms. Instead, I scanned the faces from a Bicycle poker deck (taking
care to note that the US Playing Card Company claims no copyright in the face
card designs). However, I chose not to use face cards in this image because I
wanted to use nothing but my own work. 
        For the Old Maid card, I first modeled the image in 3D and rendered it
with POV-Ray, then applied it to a card as an image map. It's just a CSG
union/difference of various spheres, with torus objects for the lips and the
spectacles. For the text, I wanted something bold and a little jarring to
accent the surprise of having the Old Maid turn up in a poker game; I chose
Letraset Westwood.
        I used OmniGraffle, a simple 2-D drawing program for the Mac, to plan
the arrangement of chips in the pot. I simply drew layers of non-overlapping
circles and wrote down their coordinates.
        I rendered the final image in POV as a PNG file, and used
GraphicConverter to convert it to JPEG format at a quality level of 86% (the
maximum quality that kept the file size below 250K).