EMAIL: ziring@erols.com
NAME: Neal Ziring
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Geography
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.erols.com/ziring/povray.htm
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray Version 3.01 (for Win32)
TOOLS USED: Corel Photopaint, Perl 5 
RENDER TIME: 61 hours
HARDWARE USED: Pentium P166

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
This is a corner of a geography classroom seen
from the student's eye.  The student is looking at the ornate
globe, their desk, their textbook, their colored pencils, the welcome
message on the blackboard, and their new spiral-bound notebook.
The student also has a view out the window at the beckoning
green grass and blue sky.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This scene grew around the globe and the desire to do
a good interior scene.  There are quite a few individual
objects in the scene.

Since the idea began with the globe, it was built first, using 
a sphere with layered pigment maps and material maps.  The
wooden stand of the globe is constructed by CSG from various 
shapes including toruses, cylinders, and lathes.  The grid
lines on the globe are a spherically-mapped material map,
the bitmap used was made in Corel Photopaint.

The textbook was built from a couple of quadric ellipsoids,
boxes, and cylinders.  The writing on the book was done with
CSG.  The picture on the book is rendering of the same world
depicted on the globe, but enclosed in a textured partially
transparent sphere to give the clouds.  This other rendering
was popped into a CSG hole in the book cover as an image map.
The font of the title "Geography" on the book cover is 
Century Schoolbook Bold Condensed.

The spiral-bound notebook was also done from those handy
quadric ellipsoids.  The each turn of the wire spiral was
made from two half-toruses, each rotated 10 degrees.

The apple is consists of a body and stem.  The body is a
lathe object with control points taken from a tracing of a
real "gala" apple and then hand-tweaked.  The stem is just
a piece of a torus.

The floor is composed of a many dozen random-length rectilinear 
boxes, each with its own randomized edition of a basic wood 
texture.  The randomized floor was generated with a perl 
script, allowing me to easily tweak the random variation
parameters for different test renderings.  The old varnish
on the floor has just a tiny bit of reflection.

The pencils are constructed from a cylinder and a cone.
To get the concentric combination of writing wax, wood, and
paint, I used a texture map with an non-turbulent texture.
The writing on the pencil is a cylindrical material map, 
the image was made with Corel PhotoPaint, the font is some 
version of Arial.

The blackboard is just a bunch of boxes.  The writing is
a set of text objects that stick out from the blackboard about
0.02 units.  The chalk is just a granite pigment that is 
partly white and partly clear.  The font of the message is Balloon.

There are three light sources in the scene: the sun,
and two overhead lights.  The sun is a default point-source
light, somewhat yellow in color, located very far away, mainly
in the -x direction.  The two overhead lights are more complex
distance-fading area lights, somewhat blue in color, meant
to resemble florescent fixtures. 

Test renderings for this scene started to get time-consuming
very early in development, so most objects were developed in
their own little test settings before being added to the
main scene.