EMAIL: rasche@cs.hope.edu
NAME: karl rasche
TOPIC: childhood

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
  (now Billy, write this 200 more times on the board, and you can go home...)

TITLE: blockses and mawbelz
COUNTRY: The United States of America
WEBPAGE: 'someday..someday I suppose'
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02
TOOLS USED: PovSB, MS photo editor (to cvrt)
RENDER TIME: somewhere around 12 days..i lost track along the way.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 266mhz 
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	When the topic was first announced, I was clueless about what to make. Then, late one night, I remembered playing with a contraption by the name of 'blocks and marbles'. I don't know if anyone else has ever heard of such a thing, but oh well. It consisted of several different (and rather oddly shaped)  blocks of wood with groves and holes in them. The whole point was to build things out of these blocks in such a way that the provided marbles (or other assorted household goodies) would run though.  If you still have no idea what I;m talking about, well, about the closest I can relate it too would be a rollercoaster for marbles.  
	Ok, so you now know what the heck the image is, now to explain where there image is set. I must admit that I am somewhat lacking in coming up with good settings for my scenes. Oh well, such is life I guess... Anyway, I originally thought it might be fun to have the monstrosity sitting in the shadow cast by the morning sun through a window. I had also hoped to have it sitting on some nice shag carpet (heheheh...), although with finals and such, I did not really have the time to explore the magical mystical world of carpet, so I settled on some nasty red tile that we had in a kitchen of a house we used to live in. So, hence you see the sterotipical superellipsoid tiles :o) 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
     All of the objects in my scene were modelled with povsb. Actually, this is not entirly true. Heh.. I put in the floor by hand; perhaps it shows.  Unfotuantly, the code is one heck of a mess, since the modeller has yet to provide nice clean output for objects that are multiply defined (hint hint..nudge nudge ;) ).  There is a little 'wall' (well, not so lil) out of the scene with a retangle cut from it and little bars in the opening with an area light behind the wall, all of which accounts for the attempt of having the shadows fo the window slats on the floor, and stuff. 
	All of the wood textures arose from a DMFWood. Basically, I just changed the colormap, the  turbulance, and the scaling. Also, I used the color picker from Noel Bundy's Texture Designer (http://twyst.home.ml.org ..i think) since I can't for the life of me mix rgb into anything in my head. The texture on the floor tiles basically was a high specular, low reflection (if I went agbout about .1, it looked very strange with the atmosphere), a low bump normal (to disturb the refelctions) and a lil crand. 
	The atmosphere...aK!.. the whole reason why this silly thing took so long. Oh well, it took about a week of trial and error and long  small test renders to get this right. 
	mm..i would go into a little more detail about the lighting and such, however since the scene has been sitting for so long rendering, I honestly have forgotten where I put them. I believe I had the one area light in the window as a main, and then 2 shadowless lights on either side of the big thing, as fills...but I;m not entirely sure..heh..oh well.

WHOOPSIE:
      If you look in the upper right hand of the pic, you;ll notice that I was about one row of tiles short. I realized this about a day into the rendering, but I was afraid that if I stopped to fix this, the render wouldn't finish in time. Well, use your imagination and picture it as like the tiles dropping off into the carpet of another room...remember, its not a bug, it's a feature ;)
      Also, the texture on the marbles is kind of wack. I was using a normal colored glass texture I had, but with the atmosphere the marbles looked like they had an extrodinaly high ambient value. Finally, I figured out that if I turned down the transmit value in the texture, the marbles look normal. So, I did my best to try and make the glass look dark..but it still looks fake imo..


     i think thats it.

     whatever. 
            -karl