EMAIL: libelle@webbwerks.com
NAME: Samuel J. Goldstein
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: StudioPro/Blitz 1.75+ Raytracer
TOOLS USED: StudioPro/Blitz 1.75+ Modeller, custom paint program.
RENDER TIME: 00:37:11
HARDWARE USED: PowerMac 8500/120 with 80M RAM, 200M Virtual RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Glass is a cool topic. I went through about 50 hours modelling a Glass Hotel
(after a Robyn Hitchcock song of the same name). It looked pathetic. After
playing for a while, I discovered that even a model that is optically correct
can look really unnatural in a ray-traced image. I'd seen this effect before:
I'd modelled a view from inside my car (for one of the early ray-trace contests
...), and was annoyed by the double reflection on the windshield. When I looked
carefully from inside my car, I realized that there really was, in fact, a
double reflection from the windshield. Physics, and all that. But the brain for
some reason filters out the second reflection. When it's looking at a
two-dimensional image, however, that second reflection gets left in there and
just looks wrong. This, then, is a problem for the physical psychology folks.

So... to make a short story long, this is a picture of the popular children's
game of marbles. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Just about everything is straight-forward modelling here.

The only tricky thing is a set of flat panels surrounding the scene and only
visible in the reflections. Four panels are colvered with blue sky and
cloud images, the other with an image of my house (incidently, the image of my
house is a rendering I'd done of the place rather than a photograph).

The pavement is flat, with color and bump maps.

The marbles are spheres, with skinned objects inside them (all given the
IOR of 1.4)

The chalk lines are actually separate objects (extruded shapes) that extend a
touch past the surface of the street itself.

The curb (kerb for you proper English speakers) is simple geometry with a large
color map and bump map.

The grass is just made of extruded poly-lines, then hand-tweaked via a vertex
editor.

I'd be happy to share the model file with anyone who requests it.
___Samuel___