EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
NAME: Paul T. Dawson
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for DOS
TOOLS USED: DOS Edit, paper, pen, 80 liters of soda. 8-)
RENDER TIME: 9 Hours 3 Minutes 8 Seconds (AA 0.3 3x3)
HARDWARE USED: AMD 486-120 with 12 megs ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The year is 2025, and Julie has rebuilt an antique toy, converting it
into the very first... Easy-Pov-Oven.

The central object in the scene is based on a popular toy from the 1960s,
the original "Easy-Bake Oven". It was a real oven, heated by a 100 watt
light bulb. You slid in tiny trays of cake mix, then waited a few minutes,
and presto - little cakes! This toy is *still* available, but the design
has evolved into something resembling a microwave oven. I used the original
first-generation slide-through design!

In the picture, Julie has used the incredible power of the Povium CPU (from
the famous chip builder Povtel), and a few secret modifications, to make
the oven BAKE actual objects from POV scene files!?! She just types in some
plain ASCII text (POV-Ray V23.1 syntax), pops in an empty tray, hits ENTER,
and two minutes later - - - real objects!

Her friend Tony is stunned speechless by the incredible process.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Each major object is created in a separate INC file. There are 13 POV test
files, to test one object at a time. Then everything is put together in the
one final E-P-O.POV file.

The walls and floor are made with triangles - all 154,448 of them! There
are four walls - you can just barely see them in the big mirror sphere.
Each wall section is a 12x12x12 cube, with 44 triangular "fins". The fins
have 88 different colors, with different gradients on opposite sides. Each
"cube" is randomly spun before it's placed in the wall.

The people are made with my "P4" people include file, which has *not* been
updated at all since the Jul-Aug competition. So, it's still the same klunky
little plastic people!

There are six aluminum "baking trays" in the scene. Each tray has one little
"thing" in it. Each thing is limited to a height of three units, so it fits
through the oven!

The first tray (halfway out of the oven) has a curly shape, made with 360
little spheres. This shape is also on the laptop screen.

The other trays, from left to right, have: some mirror spheres over a
checkerboard, one big mirror sphere, 820 recursive tori, 9 miniature people,
and 200 stretched spheres. The tray of tiny people is very disappointing,
because it uses about 3 megs of memory, and it's very fuzzy - oh, well!

The tray in the front center has a "recursive tori" thing. This has 1 large
torus, 9 medium, 81 small, and 729 tiny. That's 9^0 + 9^1 + 9^2 + 9^3 = 820.

The laptop computer is connected to a Povium CPU (feeble attempt at humor),
and then some jumbled wires go over to the circuit board in the oven.

Yes, I used a bunch of image maps! Both shirts are made from freehand GIFs.
The image on the laptop is a POV-created TGA. The little letters on the CPU
are from a GIF. Finally, the nameplate on the oven is also from a GIF.

The little spirals on the "stovetop" are made with a POV spiral pigment.
There are two knobs for four burners, just like the original toy!

I have included all of the necessary files in E-P-O.ZIP - almost 40 files!
Just run any of the TEST-##.POV files to test individual objects, or try
E-P-O.POV to build the final scene. Watch out, it uses about 7 megs of POV
memory! The triangle mesh objects create a *lot* of warnings about "No
pigment type given" - just ignore those!

Thanks for reading all this! 8-) P.T.D.