EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com
NAME: Glenn McCarter
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "A Rabbit's Eye View Of The Magic Act"
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0
TOOLS USED:
  Paint Shop Pro (for face image_map touchup; convert image to JPEG)
	Moray (for bezier patch modelling)

RENDER MUSIC: Radiohead
RENDER TIME: 5h 13m
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-90

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"What's going on?  I don't understand.  I was looking forward to
nibbling on a nice carrot. But before I knew it, I was stuffed into
a tophat, placed under hot bright lights, then heard a bunch of
humans clapping their paws together.

My master starts waving strange objects over me.
He releases a sparkling dust over me and makes funny noises.
Suddenly, he leans over, and grabs my ears...!"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

All objects, lights, textures were created by me, specifically for
this IRTC scene.  All models were created in the POV-Ray text editor,
except for the bezier patches which were manipulated in Moray.

The overhead lights are in an include file "StageLight.inc", which
makes multicolored spotlights with adjustable settings.  Each these lights
are functional, illuminating the scene in various colors.  These are hung
onto a rigging structure over the stage.  The remaining girders, cables,
and roof structure are CSGs.

To render this unusual point of view, a very wide angle camera is
used.  It is placed in the bottom of the tophat, and is nearly vertical.

The zipfile includes my expanded and more user-friendly "BlobHead.inc" and
"BlobHand.inc" include files, which create fully poseable head and hands
using blobs.

The performer's head uses a novel approach -- I have not seen this
technique used before in raytracing:  First, the head shape is made using
blobs, and given a basic skin texture.  Then, an image_map of a face
is mapped onto the blob head structure, providing the face details.
The advantage to this is that in addition to having superb detail,
the head fits into it's environment: features on the head react to the
lighting to form appropriate shadows and highlights.  The head
can be rendered from various angles with remarkable realism.  It's
almost like magic!