EMAIL: zaphod@utw.com
NAME:Rick Jones & Shawn Ridenour
TOPIC:School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAY TRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE:Day Dreaming
COUNTRY: USA
RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.00e
TOOLS USED: PovRay, Paint Shop Pro 4
RENDER TIME : 1hr 27 Min 15 sec
HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 w/ 64 mb Ram running Windows NT 4.0

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This image is a turn of the century school room from the students view point.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Rick and I had played with POV for a few months and had created a few objects.  
Up until now our  'scenes' usually consisted of an object we had just made in
the hills, or an object we had just made in the spot light, or an object we 
had just made ...  you get the point.  When Rick came up with the idea of 
entering the irtc and had come up with the basic artistic layout of the school 
room, we decided that for this image we wanted to create several detailed
objects with the focus on no particular one  (attempting to model real life).  
Most of the room evolved and details grew as we did periodic traces to see 
what was working and what wasn't.  For example, the books ended up looking 
far cooler than we thought they would, so we threw a bunch in.  Also, the 
butterflys were a last second idea we had to help balance the image out,
and they worked wonders for the over all picture.  Oddly enough though, 
the basic lay-out of the room is pretty much what we started with.   

The original concept was based on a rough sketch Rick made after being 
inspired by a picture he saw in an encyclopedia. The concept was to capture 
the school room from the students point of view, sort of the students world 
vs the school room. The school room was to be formal and worn, and the 
students desk, although invaded by the school room, more personal and 
whimsical. The opened window (especially with the final addition of 
butterflys) offered the illusion of escape (and a dramatic light source). 
The turn of the century motif is meant to add to the drama and interest of
the picture.

We did all the object modeling from within pov (using smaller test view files
to build the objects)  Most of the objects in our scene were built using 
scripted CSGs with predeclared variable height, width, depth, texture, etc.  
By placing the csg in an inc file and making the predeclared variables random, 
we could include the inc file several times to get multiple copies of an object 
that all looked different.  This technique was used to generate the bricks, 
books, boards and butterflys in our image.

We used Paint Shop Pro to build the image maps for the chalk boards and the 
dunce cap, and to create the bump maps for the carvings and scratches for 
the desk and the bitemarks on the pen.

The books take advantage of a pitfall in CSG objects.  The gold scribbles
(i.e. titles) were created by using the CSG pitfall of 'coincidence surfaces'.
This means that if two object edges are precisely aligned, pov randomly 
alternates between which surface to render.  So Shawn aligned a random number
of gold cylinders with the book binding to create our 'titles'.  Combining
this with the almost purely random nature of the books made it easy for us
to create a library, once the first book was made.

A more complex layered texture was created for the plastered walls. Rick used 
a brick texture map with a white layer with transparent holes to allow the 
brick to show through where the plaster had cracked. The crack normal was
used to get a stucco texture in the plaster. The texture got its best life 
when we added subdued shadowless light sources to increase the ambient light 
in the room.

The glasses are a case of a good idea turning out great. We wanted to obtain 
a realistic refraction affect and tried various glasses placements on the desk. 
We placed the glasses on the end of the students chalk board in a test render, 
then forgot about their placement. When we rendered the entire room we realized 
we had finally captured the affect we wanted (the stool and desk edge distorted 
in the glasses lense).

The apple is based on a lathe object with some CSG additions to make it more 
irregular. Most people who saw the image commented it would be humorous if the 
apple had a bite taken out of it. Not being the kind to turn down a challenge, 
our final apple was born.

One of the disadvantages to an evolving scene was we lost several details that
no longer fit into the image.  When we started Rick had built an incredibly
realistic wood floor, with creaky warped floorboards and all.  But as the
focus shifted to students desk, we ran out of room for the floor in the image.
We had also created a several fully detailed and articulated human models to
populate the class room with, but in the end decided to drop them because
they looked far too realistic for the scene.  :)