too_loud.jpg, too_loud.scene, too_loud.txt  6/30/95
by Michael C. Whidden.   mwhid@cis.ufl.edu

Well, this is my entry for the Ray Tracing competition.  The theme was
"Science", and I was hard pressed to come up with anything good.  Since
I was interested in trying to model my stereo, I decided to attempt to
make the stereo fit the science them, so I added a little spark and the
caption.  Not exactly a good fit, but the picture still looks cool, I
think.  Took me about a month, at about 2 hours a day.

The image was entirely done with POV-Ray for Macintosh, using image maps
for the labels above the buttons and for the Orange equalizer display.  
Anyone who wants the source files can have them.  Here, they are concatenated
into the single file, too_loud.scene.

POV-Ray doesn't let you do text very easily, so the text is rendered as
a height-field, where the height is based on a GIF image of the text
I wanted.

All objects in this scene are original.  The boxes with the rounded corners
were created by a program I wrote to simplify their creation.  The image
maps were drawn using ClarisWorks and converted then converted to Gifs.

The spark leaping from the phone jack to the plug is a radial color_map
with some turbulence on a disc.  Most of the color map is clear, so you don't
see the disk.  The flash of light near the spark that is visible on the 
stereo and the ground is made with two colored spotlights.


						-Michael C. Whidden
						mwhid@cis.ufl.edu