EMAIL: pmccombs@xmission.com
NAME: Peter McCombs
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: A Twisted Prison
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
WEBPAGE: http://www.xmission.com/~pmccombs
RENDERER USED:

	POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED:

	Moray v3.3
	Wings3D 0.98.11c
	The Gimp v1.2
	xfig
	PovTree 1.0/Tomtree.inc (Tom Aust, Gena Obukov)
	Lightsys.inc (Jaime Vives)
	3dclouds.inc (Sascha Ledinsky)
	pcmhair.mcr (Chris Colefax)
	Public Textures by Jeremy A. Engleman

RENDER TIME: 

	Time For Parse:    0 hours 15 minutes  48.0 seconds (948 seconds)
	Time For Trace:   19 hours 22 minutes  49.0 seconds (68226 seconds)
	Total Time:   19 hours 12 minutes  54.0 seconds (69174 seconds)*

	*How does POV-Ray figure 19 hrs 12 minutes total? :)

HARDWARE USED: 

	Athlon XP 2000+
	512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This started out as a chrome sphere on a red and white checkered plane; 36 
source lines of SDL (2 objects, 1 infinite!). This is my attempt to make 
something interesting from a familiar scene.

I probably run the risk of being a little bit redundant this round, but I 
thought that the old chrome sphere cliche was a good start for surrealism.

There's a lot of meaning (intended or otherwise) in this image. See if you can
figure it out. :)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

During the genesis of this image, the aspect ratio moved from the old 4/3 to 
the current 1/2 that you see. You might have to scale it down to fit the whole 
image on screen.

I replaced the flat plane with a big sphere to suggest a non-infinite horizon. 
Fog was used to add depth to the atmoshpere, and a sky sphere provides the 
ambience for the scene.

I wanted to make the chrome sphere interesting, and I started by enhancing the
lighting with Jaime Vives' lightsys. This provided the area light for the soft 
shadows, and it can do a pretty good simulation of sunlight. I also added some
basic radiosity settings to improve the ambient lighting in the scene.

I went to Jeremy Engleman's Public Textures site to get some good stone 
textures. I used the Gimp to make the stone texture seamless, this way it can 
wrap onto a sphere without betraying the edges of the texture map. 

In order to create a convincing stone texture, I decided to make the stone 
sphere into an isosurface, where the function is based on the texture map. I 
took the stone texture map and reduced it to gray scale. The color version was 
then mapped onto the resulting isosurface.

With the 1/2 aspect ratio, I needed some more content to fill up the image above
the sphere. It was an ideal opportunity to use one of PovTree's Poplar models.

The checker pattern was replaced with a dirt texture, and I recreated a checker
board with some simple boxes with a procedural texture. The grass was done with
Chris Colefax's hair macro and the compressed mesh stuff.

I built the bench in Moray, with a height field for the arm rests designed in
xfig. The textures are again from the public textures library.

The pawns, belaying pins and pinrail, sheaves, beckets, strops and other block
pieces were modeled in Moray.  The block's hook was modeled in Wings3D.

The ropes were the most technically difficult pieces. The big rope is a number
of spheres rotated and translated along a spline. I used lots of vector 
functions and the trace() feature quite a bit to get the siezing on the rope 
ends. The smaller haul rope is a simple sphere sweep.

The clouds come from Sascha Ledinsky's 3D clouds include. These are standard 
layered clouds.

The output was converted to JPG with the Gimp, which was also used to add the
title text to the image.

Sorry about the lack of source files. I'll try and post it on my site once I get
it all cleaned up. It really is quite a large package with all of the maps and
objects.

The final scene contained somewhat more than half a million objects, a bit up
from the two that I started with.