EMAIL:         famrom@ran.es
NAME:          Guillermo Sanz Romero
TOPIC:         School
COPYRIGHT:     I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:         Alarm Bell
WEBPAGE:       http://www.geocities.com/SliconValley/4774/index.html
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.01.msdos.wat-cwa
TOOLS USED:    DOS Edit and Micrografx Picture Publisher 5.0
RENDER TIME:   2h 55m 16s
HARDWARE USED: PC iP55-166MHz(MMX)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"Riiing! Riiing! Riiing!" the alarm bell announces a fire-practice.
"Kids, we are going to leave the class now! Take only the coats, OK?"
The kids smile, this class is over. :)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

How many times has everyone waited the ring of the bell, specially in the
middle of a boring class? Fire-practices are one of the more interesting
events at school.

The School theme was in part easy (everyone has gone to school) and difficult
(to many obvious scenes). I hope to have done a original one: you see a class
room, reflected in the metallic alarm bell (distorted to simulate the
imperfection of the polishment).

This idea of the reflection was inspired in part by a series of emails in the
irtc mailing list, about if the people build more thing than the directly
visible, so reflected and refracted rays hit something instead of returning
a "sky_sphere hit" or background color. The other part was inspired by a
comment that somebody write about "work theme" (proposed as theme for irtc).
The comment said something like: "you don't have to create human figures to
show a paramedic intervention, you can draw the image of the minute after the
intervention (gloves all over the place, the ambulance moving away...)".
Creating humans with POV (no modeller) is hard (a crazy thing, indeed), I have
tried and the result has some anime feeling and takes a lot of time, more
than the avaliable at this moment.

First I created the room with windows and a door (you can see it, it's cyan).
I also put a corridor (to continue the scene through the open door) and a
sky_sphere (the top blue reflection, the left is the door). The floor is a
checker pattern (typical) with a bump map to give depth to each tile.

Then I created a desk for the kids and put it many times to fill the class
(pale green surface, with gray drawer and legs and dark green back and seat).
Continuing with furniture I created the teacher's desk (with drawer and cover)
and chair (chromed tubes with green cloth for the seat and back) (I think
they don't reflect, but they are there).

After this I started to work on the illumination (until now I had been working
with a central light). The 1st try was a area_light (the position of each
point matches the center of one of the florescent lights) and the 2nd was
multiple area_lights (one area_light per florescent group). The final render
was made with the single area_light (without jitter) because the result has
smooth shadows with banding (remember that in the class I have set multiple
lights, visible as boxes with white halo (a bit blueish)). The single light
gave a hard shadow and the multiple area_lights' shadow was too smooth (near
no shadow). The single area_light aproximates more realistically the
illumination of a typical class room (I observed the shadows in one of my
classes ;) ).

Next I build the alarm bell, one of these with chromed and red parts. The
first versions were too simple (boxes) and the bell was too random (due the
problems of making a lathe by graph paper & hand). So I changed the main part
of the system to scaled superellipsoids. The bells was changed then to a CGS
object. The first one have a torus with the minor radius bigger than the major,
and POVRay become "mad" (some parts were invisible). After some meditation
(to reprogram POV or not to reprogram POV?) I chose to rebuild the bell, this
time the two torus used were "normal". The final bell has a flat surface
(ideal for the reflections) and two rounded zones (the central one near the
red screw and the outter one).

I added details like two screws, the "Model 4774A" chars, the hammer and an
electrical wire with a fastening staple. All the textures were added at this
moment: if you pay attention, you will see that the metal parts are a bit
bumpy (to simulate surface imperfections). I hope this improve the result.

To finish, the books & notepads were put over the desks. Here (semifinal
render) is when the problem appeared: "where is the blackboard?" So I
immediately created one (the dirty black rectangle with gray frame visible on
the left).

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Who has said that the irtc mails don't help?
They are really inspiring!
[ And not, I not trying to get better marks =;)
 The image isn't perfect, for example: someday I will put more details,
 like kids running! ]