EMAIL: hornberger@provide.net
NAME: Noah Hornberger
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Skilled Hallucination
COUNTRY: USA
Personal WEBPAGE: http://ww.provide.net/~hornberger
RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5.2 Ray Tracer 
TOOLS USED: Ray Dream Extensions: SuperMesh, Quadrix, VisualLight 3D Aura, Textures: Picture Publisher8
RENDER TIME: 55 Minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 128 MB RAM 
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Skilled Hallucination" is a perfect example of something unbelievable.  The scene consists of related unbelievable objects that are arranged to form a nice composition. The most obvious and probably the first object that you will see is the digital clock.  The current time is 12:66 . . . a time that will never exist.  The clock is tilting on a card castle and has a blue glass ball balanced on top.  On the bookshelf there are 4 books with magical titles.  The shelf is only supported on one side.  On the desktop is a warped checkerboard that has a sand dune formation.  A palm tree is growing on the "checked island" on the desk.  Half of the image is lit with warm colored light wile the other half is cold to create a dialog with the viewer.  Over, all the composition is nice (my main challenge).  
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First I started with the Desk.  The shelves and tabletop are made from Quadrix cubes to give them soft edges unlike the hard-edged fake looking cube primitive.  I hate it when I see perfect edges on computer art.  Then I made the card castle by scanning some cards and applying the textures to a flat rectangle model.  The clock texture took me about an hour to draw in Picture Publisher8, it is applied to another Quadrix model.  I used the Supermesh extension to create the warped checkerboard.  The books are Quadrix cubes with title textures.  I found the palm tree on the Ray Dream 5 CD.  The lighting took the better part of my time.  I went through about 10 different lighting arrangements before I found a pleasing one.  After about a month's work it was ready to render. I have included my source file if you want to take a look.