EMAIL: H.A.vanderMeiden@mailsrv.twi.tudelft.nl
NAME: Rick van der Meiden
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Brain Class
COUNTRY: Netherlands
WEBPAGE: www.twi.tudelft.nl/~tw554156/
RENDERER USED: POV-ray 3.01
TOOLS USED: Deluxe Paint (image maps), lview (JPEG conversion), EDIT.COM
RENDER TIME: 15 hours (on the pentium!)
HARDWARE USED: a Pentium 90 (rendering) and my old 386 (designing)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	
	I suppose some people think there is a deeper meaning to this image. 
	Perhaps they think that schools are evil brain farms where kids are
	stuffed full of propaganda called knowledge and where their bodies
	are considered useless sacks of water and amino-acids. 
	Or perhaps some people think it is some kind of futuristic fantasy
	that someday we realy wont need our bodies anymore. 
	Or perhaps even some think that this image suggest that we should not
	judge people by how they look but by how they think.

	I just think it's funny to render brains in pots. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
	
	Since I own only a 386 PC, that's were most of the action takes place. 
	I did all the designing, coding and test rendering on my old compu. 
	The bigger renders and the final render were done on the pentium of 
	a friend. (would have taken more than 4 full days on my own computer) 
	But working on a 386 is not realy all that bad, just design each object
	in the scene separately in a POV file.
	
	First thing to do when creating a picture : brainstorm. (in edit.com)
	I came up with a classroom (boring) and imagined something funny inside it
	(brains are fun!)

	Then start scetching, on paper with good old Mr. Pencil. 

	Then think about numbers and dimensions and spheres and intersections 
	and things. Sometimes a drawing on a grid helps, but messy lines and 
	guessed numbers are more fun. 

	I started designing on the brain. Brains are realy just a knotted up 
	spagetti stuff, but that seemed a bit too diffucult to model. (without a 
	modeller or a sphere-blob-connecter-thingy programm) I just shaped the 
	'outside' of the brain from 16 non-uniform scaled spheres with a bumpy
	texture. In fact, I built a nifty include file that exports this shape. 
	I named it "the octelips" : 8 spheres connecting on the crossings 
	of the 3 axis.

	The eyes are realy pretty and detailed, but you don't see much of that in
	this render. You should realy check them out someday. It's a white ball
	with a blood-vein texture on it (radial&turbulence), a black hole in it, 
	covered by the iris which is a disc with a radial texture and a hole in 
	it that we call the pupil. The iris and pupil are covered by a lens which 
	is a little more bend than the eyeball sphere, giving a great double 
	phong effect. 

	The classroom is lighted by four lightsources, one in each window, 
	simulating the ambient light from outside lighting the room. (I planned 
	to use 4 3x3 area lights, each as big as the window, but rendering took
	long enough allready.)

	The canisters containing the brains are as simple as they look. Note
	that the 'water' (the green stuff) in the cans does not refract the light. 
	I did not set the index of reflection on purpose because the brains 
	looked too warped and to big. (which is physicaly correct unfortunately)

	The fluorescent tube lights are held by a piece of metal with is very 
	nicely shaped using a parabolic shape. Once again, too bad you cannot 
	realy see it in this picture. Feel free to rip it from the source though.

	The tables are just made of simple boxes with simple textures. 

	And the drawings and the text on the black board are very funny too. 
	("we don't need bodies" and that sort of propaganda and something about
	the anatomy of the brain)

	Did you notice how all the brain critters are staring at YOU. If I had 
	rendered an animation from this POV file, the eyes would follow the
	camera. Nice work with lots of #whiles and maths and such. 

I think I've said more than enough here. Have a nice day.