TITLE: Refried Dreams
NAME: Simon de Vet
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: sdevet@istar.ca
WEBPAGE: http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: refried.jpg
ZIPFILE: refried.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray Superpatch

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray (with many plugins), Rhino (demo), Adobe PhotoDeluxe (for
imagemaps, heightfields)

RENDER TIME: 
    4h10m (more or less)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I am a great fan of Science Fiction, but I was born well after the hayday of
classic SF. This image is a tribute to those days.

A little background:
     The 1950's were an era when SF bloomed. There were dozens of magazines out
there, all pulp, most pretty horrific. They all had awe inspiring names like
"Amazing Tales", "Strange Worlds", "Weird Tales", and the like. My magazine,
"Unbelievable Science Stories" is a tribute to these days of pulp. Browsing a
number of online archives, I noticed a pattern in the cover art. They all
featured terrible monsters on a dark red background, bland grey planets on
bland grey backdrops (printing quality was lousy back then), or female space
women, wearing giant fishbowl helmets, and very little else. These covers were
usually yellow. :)
     These stories always featured gallant scientist/adventurer heroes who saved
the day with scientific knowledge and terrible dialogue. Space operas, and
space westerns ruled. Sword fights in orbit, gunfights on the moon. The
chickens from planet Ziploid (I'm not making this up). Aliens with tentacles.
     At the same time, there was an overtone to the tales. The cold war raged,
and people lived in fear of the "Reds". This was often a feature in the
stories, with the aliens represented as evil invaders. The bomb made science
suddenly much scarier, and the stories reflected this, whether through more
scary science, or happy, utopian science.

     This is what my image represents. I am contrasting the colourful,
unbelievable pulp worlds of SF with the grim, and very real, colourless cold
war. Hence, a little reading material for the long wait in the bomb shelter.


     BTW, about half these stories were written for the sole purpose of having a
bad pun. Alien space chickens who were conditioned to cross the road "to get to
the other side." The floating city of Atlantis sinking under waves of fliers.
With the theme of my image, how could I resist a title of "Refried Dreams"? :)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image evolved, dramatically. My original idea was one that never made it to
the Imaginary Worlds round: a magazine store front, in balck and white,
reflecting a city of tomorrow, in colour, in the window. Then it became a
colour postcard of the city of tomorrow, in colour, laying in a gutter.
Finally, the idea of a bomb shelter came to mind.

I also discovered the demo version of Rhino, and fell in love. I will be buying
this soon. The magazines, the spoon, the sign, the cans, the car, the shelf
brackets, the can opener, and the beans featured on the cans were all made in
Rhino, and rendered in POV, through Moray.

The bricks are superquadratics combined with a very high resolution height field
for the mortar. The shelf itself is CSG, made with the Rounded Cube plugin that
came with Moray.

The objects were textured with Moray, for the most part. Shiny objects were
given slope dependant reflections with the superpatch. The magazine pages were
scanned from Issac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (Issue one. The white line
visible is a cigarette ad). The cards were also scanned. The magazines were
given cover image maps based on rendered images, as was the can label.

The whole thing was rendered in the Superpatch, using radiosity.

The zip file includes the .pov, .ini, and .inc files used, as well as the
magazine covers and can label maps (since I'm proud of them, and there's a lot
of details you can't see in the pic) I didn't include any of the models made in
Rhino, or and heightfields, since they are very large. If you are interested in
any files not present in the zip, send me a message, and I'll be happy to give
them over.


Thanks go out to:
     Alex Magidow, for solving a problem that caused my pile of magazines to
become a pile of of can openers. (!!)
     SF, for the inspiration
     The IRTC mailing list, for ideas, discussion.
     povray.binaries.images for comments on an early version, and many good
ideas.
     The folks of #povray on IRC, for comments on an even earlier version.
     Kibo.
     Achimedes Plutioium, King of all Science!