FILE:           PCGIBSON.JPG 
TITLE:          Tube 'n' Maple Dreams
AUTHOR:         Patrick Collins
E-MAIL:         p_collins@aims.gov.au
DATE:           26/02/95
RENDERING OPTs: +w800 +h600 +a0.3 +r2 +linclude 
RENDERING TIME: 6 hrs 23 CPU minutes, using the pvmpovray patch on a series
                of RS6000 workstations running AIX 3.2. Real time: 1 hr 10
                mins.

Gibson guitars and Marshall amplifiers have long been two of the most
desired instruments for a guitarist. They have become the default drool
for most young guitarists and those fantasies are carried through to
adolescence when they actually scrape enough money together to buy
their first gibson (I know I was one). Having fulfilled the first dream
the budding guitarist ridiculously thinks that the first goal was too
easy to reach, and should aspire for something a little higher, say 30
FEET high.  Sadly, watching too many post-pubescent guitarists try and
achieve the second goal, that of playing through a stack of Marshall
JCM900s so wide it disappears into the void of a huge stage, has on
some occasions almost bought me to tears. "Tube 'n' Maple Dreams" is a
rendering whose primary purpose is to try and satisfy my (and other's)
disgusting and wanton needs for incredible tube-screaming volume (Oh, and 
of course to get into the February PoVray competition).

I initially modelled some of the guitar and amplifier on Moray and,
after exporting it once and making a few changes to the output files I
was condemned to do the rest by hand. I found Moray MOST useful for
finding the right camera angle. Finding this is the biggest pain in the
neck when creating a scene, IMHO.
Most of the text scene files look nothing like the original scene files
exported from Moray because I needed to optimise them to get any kind
of rendering performance. The Marshall amplifier has been #declared and
the repositioned in  many places. I have since found that this was
probably not a good way to do it, since the amp is rather flat and is
VERY expensive to copy more than a few times. I would, in future, take
a front view of the Marshall amplifier and use that as an image-map on
to a box, and then copy that imagemap around. I know that this wouldn't
look as good but the rendering time would be greatly reduced.  
I used ctdws to create the guitar cord and used PaintShop Pro to edit
the image maps. The Marshall and Gibson imagemaps were scanned in from
a magazine using a 600dpi scanner.  The texture for the Gibson is a
wood texture which has been overlaid by an onion texture scaled to fit
the oval and colored from red to clear in the middle. The rest of the
guitar is colored by just red stain over wood.

I am very happy with the results expecially the textures. The only
thing that looks strange on the guitar is the sharp corners on the
body. It needs to be smoothly rounded, maybe with Ver 3.0 eh?

Don't try tracing this scene on any PC you will be waiting till the end of
time. Comment the stack of Marshalls for a PC render.

Happy PoVing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Patrick Collins.                                      Aus:   (077) 534 414
 p_collins@aims.gov.au                           wWw   Intrn: +2 77 534 414
 Australian Institute of Marine Science         (o o)
---------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-------------------

P.S. I am about to release some shareware software for spline based
keyframe animation of PoV scene files. None of the fine print will be
there, such as "the spline will only pass through the end points", the
spline WILL pass through every point because it is an interpolating
B-spline. The animation program will allow the rotation, translation,
scale and color animation of any #declared object.