TITLE: felloff NAME: Ian MacKay COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: ianm@hermes.net.au WEBPAGE: None TOPIC: From Rubbage Bin to Junkyard COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION JPGFILE: felloff.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 for Windows TOOLS USED: Photoshop to adjust contrast and convert to Jpeg. RENDER TIME: 14days 8hours 18minutes 9seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 2.4Ghz 725 Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This has been an epic production. In this scene our protagonist is out of sight due to embarrassment. He has been transporting unwanted goods to the junkyard/second-hand dealer. The lawnmower was tied on, but not the plastic bin, which has fallen off. A human figure would have been desirable but although I now have Poser I have not figured out how to work it. Besides, the render would have taken until next year. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Most of this image is CSG. The vehicle in the foreground and the car on the left are modified versions of vehicles that I made a few months ago for another project. The fence has layered textures to give the old corrugated iron look. The smoke is my first media effect that has come out as I intended. The grass was made with while-loops. It was much thicker at first but was later thinned down to its present sparse state in an effort to reduce rendering time. The various components of the scene were made separately, with more detail than shows in the final image. I assembled them for a test run. After 17 hours the rendering was progressing so slowly that I stopped it. I made some hasty and ill-considered alterations to speed the rendering, and set it to run again. This time I let it finish though it took more than four days. After correcting most of the errors I started what was to have been the final render at 1024 x 768 +AA. Two and a half days into this render there was a mains power interruption for a few seconds. Progress had been so slow that I reduced the size to 800 x 600 +AA before I started it again. This final render ran to completion though for a long time I feared that it would not finish before the deadline. Progress was slower than grass growing. "Glacial" also seems to understate it. "Geological, tectonic" would be more like it. From 60%complete to 70%complete took 5 days alone. The rendering finished 27 hours before the deadline. The area light at 5 x 5 seems to have been the main reason for the slow render. I used it to soften the shadows but now think that its price was too high considering the small area of shadow visible. Another contributor to slow rendering seems to have been reflective surfaces. The grass also slowed things down quite a bit. I had previously considered a rendering time of a few hours to be a long time. In this case I doubt that the final product was worth it. I have not included the pov file which is a mess from alterations, additions and subtractions. Even I find it very confusing to read. I will try to tidy it up later. I can send it to anyone if they think they can learn anything from it.