Name: Abigail Mawson (Abs or Abbie for short)
Contact via friend: Mr.Tickle@uk.ac.uce (prefared)
                    Vienna@uk.ac.uel (if all else fails)
Scene name: VIRTUOSO MUSICIAN
File name: VIRTUOSO.JPG VIRTUOSO.ZIP
Tools used: Pencil + pen
            Note and graph paper
            Basic Calculator
            Text editor
            POV 2.2
            Display 1.86 for .JPG file
            486-33
Comments:
                      WHERE THE IDEA CAME FROM

In the beginning there was nothing.  Then Light!  The scene was traced
but it wasn't very good as there was nothing to look at.

My first idea was simple.  Have lots of glass notes floating up out of
some water and inside each note have a different musical instrument.  The
instruments would only need to be basic because I could distort them
inside the notes.  I decided that would be too easy though so I scrapped
the idea.

Within my scetches and notes for the first idea was a basic trumpet.  I
liked the look of it and could see a challenge/idea.  To make it more
detailed I hunted through an encyclopedia and found a rather small poorly
painted trumpet.  I then drew it on graph paper as I thought it should look.
At the same time breaking it down into shapes.  The hard bit was working out
how to create the funnel thing.  By luck more than judgement I eventually
managed to sort it out.  The rest was keying in my notes, co-ordinates,
calculated angles and joining them all together.

I wanted someone playing the instrument but I don't understand how to
calculate surface normals.  So instead of a detailed face I thought about
using a robot face.  While I broke down the basic shape in my head I
realised that a head is only a container for gooey junk.  Must have been
all the coffee I'd been drinking.  So 'stalky' was envisioned.  The rest of
the idea grew from there.

                        SUMMARY/INFORMATION

The trumpet took about 2 days to create.  This is from the basic breakdown
to the construction and texturing.

The arms and positioning of all the objects took another day and a half.  
With another half day spent on debugging and tweaking.

I was working on the scene from 10am till 11pm each time.  Confessions of an
addict.  Anyway thanks to Brian for keeping the coffee flowing.

The final scene took 11hrs 46mins on a 486-33Mhz with +a0.2 +j0.75 @ 800x600.

Guess what.  I hated the floor and background.  I wasn't keen on one of the
textures and the lighting was dreadful.  It all looked so tacky, like one
street back from Niagra Falls or Blackpools promenade.  So after changing 
the lighting into a spotlight and replacing the floor the tracing time 
dropped a bit.

1hr 45mins 45secs with +a0.3 @ 640x480

The old floor was made of meshed cylinders with a semi-clear highly reflective
plane.  The background used to be a gradient of blue->red from the top left .