EMAIL: douge@ppe.com
NAME: Douglas Eichenberg
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING
           COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Capitol
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.getinfo.net/douge
RENDERER USED: POVRay v3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray v3.1, NuGraf/PolyTrans v2.2j, Paint Shop Pro v4.1
RENDER TIME: 6h 5m 37s
HARDWARE USED: 400 MHz PII/Windows NT/192Mb/HP Scanjet IIcx
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:  
	In May of 1999 a Yugoslavian immigrant named Rajish Muhammed 
Agrippa stopped to rest in a public park a few blocks from his home.  
A woman walking nearby with her daughter, her attention drawn by the 
flock of birds gathering around the old man, saw him jump to his feet, 
stagger a few steps to the side, and fall over.  By the time an ambulance
arrived he was dead.
	The story would probably have ended there, but police were unable
to locate any surviving relatives.  An officer was dispatched to the man's 
apartment where he met with the landlord.  When they entered they were 
astonished to find nearly a thousand tiny silver sculptures.  Most of 
the sculptures were based on local Washington, D.C.-area architecture.  The 
collection is estimated to be worth as much as $300,000.
	The officer called a friend of his who happened to be a photographer.
When she arrived she was amazed to see a tiny, intricate sculpture of the
U.S. Capitol, roughly 25mm long, 11mm wide, and 9mm tall.  She grabbed a 
nearby penny and stood it up behind the sculpture for reference and snapped
a picture.
	Neighbors said that Agrippa, a retired jeweller, became very with-
drawn after his wifes death, and spent most of his time cooped up in the
tiny apartment creating his sculptures.  His miniature U.S. Capitol, carved
from silver, is considered by experts to be the smallest such sculpture ever
done.  In a recent article, art historian Leonard Giesecke wrote: "The amount 
of skill and patience that must have been involved in creating this sculpture
staggers the mind, and most likely borders on the pathological."
	Agrippa was 78 when he died, and is believed to have created most
of his sculpture between the time of his wifes death and his own, a period
of only 5 years, 3 months, 8 days, 27 minutes and 3.14159 seconds.
  
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:  
	The scene contains a total of 41279 frame level objects, 99.95% of 
which are the triangles that make up the capitol model.  Focal blur was used 
with maximum settings (100 blur samples, 0.999 confidence, 0.0001 variance).
There are a total of 6 lights (2 area lights and 4 point lights). Three of the
point lights were placed very close to the front of the capitol building to
help distinguish the pillars, and I assigned fade values to them so they 
wouldn't cast shadows on the penny (or anything else behind it).
	The model of the capitol was found at 3dcafe.com in the free models
section (architecture/capitol.zip).  Originally it was a 3ds file, which I 
imported into NuGraf/PolyTrans.  For those of you who are not familiar with
it, NuGraf/PolyTrans is a commercial program for 3d file format conversion
(basically like crossroads).  It also has some excellent polygon manipulation 
functions that I used to smooth out the 3ds file.  I then exported it as a pov 
file (a very LARGE pov file, a little over 6 meg, something like 42000 lines
of pov code).  Incidentally, I would highly recommend NuGraf/Polytrans to 
anyone looking for a good 3d file format converter; it hasn't choked on me 
once, and I've put some very large files through it (see www.okino.com).  
	To create the penny I scanned a shiny, clean penny at very high 
resolution.  I then applied the resulting image as both a bump map and an
image map, projecting them onto a thin pov cylinder.  The wooden surface, the
pennies, one area light, and one point light were done in Moray.  I then took
the resulting pov file and pasted in the code for the capitol building, as
well as adding the other four lights and doing some general tweaking.
	All in all, I'm reasonably happy with the image.  I think the focal
blur looks very realistic (kind of how something looks when you cross your
eyes).  The wood texture is decent too, I suppose.  The only problem I have
with the penny is around the circumference of the cylinder: the pixels on 
the outer edge of the image map get 'extruded' along the length of the 
cylinder.  I'm also unhappy with some parts of the capitol building: there's
some noticeable aliasing (unavoidable at 800x600 because the pillars are so
small), and I also think it looks too 'clean' (it needs some nicks and dirt
like the penny... perhaps a transparent image map).  The center of focus is 
a little off, too.
	Feel free to e-mail me with any comments, questions, suggestions, 
etc.  If you send any attachments then e-mail me at douge@nls.net (the other 
e-mail address has a filter on it).