EMAIL: daxrembo@bcl.net
NAME: Keith & Kelly McCormick
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: KMROOM
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: none yet
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0
TOOLS USED: PSP, pencil and paper, tape measure
RENDER TIME: 23 hours 27 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-166

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

When I first saw the topic I figured I'd take all the models I'd made in
past and give them a glass texture.  However, I've only been using povray
for a short time now and my models consist of a balloon (my attempt at the
last topic, never turned in) and a blob girl.  I didn't think these would
make an overly impressive image.

I then thought for a long time and came up with nothing, until I looked 
around the living room and realized that there was a good deal of glass 
about.

This picture is a scale image of the living room.  Anyone who can tell what
movies the TV image and the bottle image are from gets an "A" for relatively
obscure movie identification.  The poster image is my favorite Dali image and
the book was so named in order to keep with the topic.  The afore mentioned 
images were also going to keep with the theme, but after many hours of 
searching the web for such images I had a headache and no pictures.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The basic construction of this image was done by walking around the living
room with a measuring tape and writing down numbers.  I then constructed the
various objects in POV-Ray 3.0 and put them in their respective places.

The bottle and TV bit maps were taken from the 
Cronenberg Home Page http://www.netlink.co.uk/users/zappa/cronen.html
The poster bit map was taken from
Sun Net ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/art/salvador.dali
The texture on the couch (seen reflected on the coffee table) is from Apex textures.
Many thanks and appreciation to those sites and the people who maintain them.

   This image should probably be called "fun with prisms and superellipsoids,"
as most of the object are simply CSG's containing these primitives. 
   The ashtray is a difference of two conic prisms and 2 cylinders.  The
ashes are a height field.
   The cigarettes are cylinders with a height field for the coal at the end.
   A halo was used put smoke above the ashtray.  I would have liked to put the
smoke closer to the cigarettes, however the sphere it was contained in seemed
to cast a shadow on the table.  I don't really understand why it did this and
would appreciate any suggestions to eliminate it.
   The TV is mostly superellipsoids, thus giving a curved screen.  The TV's
image was given an ambient value of 1.
   The speakers are a box and a conic prism for the front, although the shape 
is hard to see.  
   The big glass candle holder is made from a hexagonal conic prism.  After 
creating the basic prism, some simple math and trigonometry (ohhh... my 
head still hurts) was used to place it such that a soccer ball-like object 
was formed.  Squashed spheres with a granite texture were then placed in the
square holes formed by the hexagons.  Two square prisms were placed on the
bottom in order to form a base.  A candle with a radial color pattern 
was placed inside the candle and an emitting halo was used to make a flame.
A dim light was placed inside the candle in order to emulate the flame.
The glass texture incorporates just about everything a glass finish has to 
offer, including IOR, irid, etc.  Although it seemed that the candle and
flame were lost in the object they were reflected in the table.  The light
gave an unexpected side effect of projecting the granite pattern of the spheres
onto the wall by the plant.
   The large bottle is mostly a lathe and a torus for the bottom ridge.  In order
to get a different label on the front and the back, the bottle was cut in half
with plane difference and had a different label mapped onto each half.  The labels
were created in PSP.
   The cola bottle was created with a lathe for the neck and cylinder with a number of
squashed spheres differenced from it for the body.  The text, "K&K Cola," was 
created by getting the intersection of a text object and the bottle.  This 
intersection was then translated out from the bottle to give a painted look, oh 
yeah, and avoid coincidental surfaces.
   The book is a CSG with gold stamped text.  The pages are a repeated gradient pattern.
   The plant was produced with Paul T. Dawson's excellent Tree program.  Many thanks to
Mr. Dawson.
   The stereo is pretty simple, but the LED display was created by scaling the height 
of boxes to the equation of a parabola with a random deviation from this eq.
   The carpet is a compilation of all the ugly carpets in all the rental apartments I've
lived in during the last few years.
   A couch with two people on it was placed in the room.  These can't be seen except
reflected in the coffee table and the large bottle.  The couch is all superellipsoids
and the people are blobs.
   I would have liked to put jittering area lights in the room in order make softer
shadows, but since there is a two month limit on the construction of the images for
this contest, I wasn't sure it would render in time.

   I learned many things during the production of this image; (1) Glass takes a long
time to render, (2) Text takes a long time to render, (3) Combine the two and you might
as well go on vacation.