EMAIL: sloan@geosim.msfc.nasa.gov
NAME: Steve Sloan II
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "Recess": A Scene From "Night Court"
HOMETOWN: Hartselle, Alabama, USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uah.edu/cs/students/ssloan/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.02, SPatch, Corel Draw 7, hand-coding
RENDER TIME: A few hours (I forgot to check the time)
HARDWARE USED: 486 DX4-100 with Win 95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This is a portrait of a magician.

The Honorable Judge Harold T. Stone, of the Manhattan Criminal
Court Part 2 (the Night Court) is a rather unorthodox judge, but
he's also an accomplished magician. He loves nothing better than
wowing the lawyers and bailiffs with magic tricks and pranks. His
idols are Harry Houdini and Mel Torme. One of his biggest magic
tricks was ALMOST escaping from a safe, like his hero Houdini. He
loves clothes and music from the forties, a time the Assistant DA,
Dan Fielding, calls "a bygone and best-forgotten era." He also
likes weird knicknacks. His stuffed armadillo, Clarence, is usually
on Harry's desk in his office, but occasionally, he ends up in some
weird places. This scene is set during court recess, when Harry has
taken a break. He left some of his stuff on the judge's bench. You
can see his hat, the book he's currently reading, Clarence, his
gavel, and a pen in its holder. He's reading the book, "How to
Escape a Safe" by Harry Houdini (I made up the book title. I don't
think that's a real book), to prepare for his next attempt. If you
squint, you can see a Mel Torme bookmark in his book. The hat is a
style from the forties.

"Night Court" was a situation comedy from the eighties. It's also
one of my favorite shows, because of its offbeat humor. It's almost
like an "Airplane" movie set in a court room, full of sight gags,
puns, and even some drama. It starred Harry Anderson as the judge.
In real life, Harry started out as a magician, before he became an
actor. On stage, and in the show, he usually wears the hat.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

When I first heard that the topic would be Magic, I thought about
Clarke's Law: "A sufficienty advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic." I thought of applying that law to the Arabian Nights, to
create a kind of techno-Arabia, complete with high-tech-looking
minarets, and a flying carpet that uses technology to fly. Then, I
saw a rerun of "Night Court," and it made me realize that I could do
a "Night Court" scene. It gave me an excuse to practice on an indoor
scene, which is something I haven't really tried before.

I'm very proud of the hat. I created it in just a few minutes with
sPatch, an excellent utility for creating objects out of bezier
patches. I borrowed the felt texture from a couple of postings about
furry and soft textures I founbd in the comp.graphics.rendering.
raytracing newsgroup.

I'm also very proud of Clarence. I took his measurements from an
illustration of a 9-banded Texas armadillo in an old dictionary. His
head and body are made from CSG operations with spheres, cones and
planes. His legs and feet are made from blob objects. They're
articulated, so you can set the kneebend angles. I made several
trials to see what the most realistic angles would be. His tail is
made from dozens of linked cones, set to follow any parametric
function I decide to use. I used a simple scaled circle function,
with sine and cosine, but it can be easily modified to use more
complex functions. I know real armadillo tails drag on the ground,
but the real Clarence on the show was stuffed with his tail curving
over his head.

The gavel is made of two lathe objects. The pen and holder was made
of a lathe object, a sphere, and a cylinder. I used one of the metal
textures that came with POV to create the pen holder.

The book is made of simple CSG objects and image maps. I found the
picture of Harry Houdini in chains, the Houdini signature, and the
picture of Mel Torme on the web, and created the text in Corel Draw
7. I did some post-processing on the image maps using Corel PhotoPaint
7, LView Pro, and Irfan View.

The lights are an attempt to mimic the lighting on the actual courtroom
set. There are two lights on the wall behind the desk, off to the sides.
Bull the bailiff (played by Richard Moll) is 6'8", and stands just
beneath one of the lights, so I know the lights are about 7 feet off the
floor.

All the wood in this scene comes from POV's standard include files.

Except for the hat, everything in this scene is hand-coded.

One more thing. With the label I placed on the image, I tried to mimic
the text shown during the opening credits of the show. The show uses
yellow text. The title screen uses a handwritten font, which looks an
awful lot like the Staccato font, so that's what I used for "Night
Court." The actors are introduced with an italicized, all-caps font,
which looks like the Verdana font I used for the rest of the text.