EMAIL:     sporadic@core.com
NAME:      Geoff Wedig
TOPIC:     The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:     Advancing the Art
COUNTRY:   USA
WEBPAGE:   none
RENDERER USED: Megapov 0.5
TOOLS USED:    Moray, custom coding in c++
RENDER TIME:   Approximately 2-3 hours.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 400 MHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  What is a laboratory?  A place for searching out eternal truths, ie, a 
  place of enlightenment.  Some labs are only in the minds of those who do the
  experiments. . .

  For this image, I wanted to do something a little different.  I imagine there
  will be lots of western labs, with beakers and such, but I wandered further
  afield.  The Asian martial arts and philosophy were created based upon
  experimentation, both in mind and body.  The text on the scroll in the fore
  ground is a combination of real Japanese calligraphy and fonts that were uv-mapped
  to the scroll.  It reads "Hakko Denshin Ryu Jujutsu", "Koho shiatsu finger Pressure
  Medicine" and "Geoffrey C. Wedig" (lines from right to left).  The first two are
  the arts which I have studied, carrying on the tradition.

  I wanted the still life to seem a bit timeless, and yet as if someone had just walked
  away.  I also wished to evoke the sense of something being discovered.  Thus the
  scroll is opened where the two lights (the moonlight from the non-visible window
  and the lantern) merge, the brightest part of the image.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  This image started almost accidentally.  I wanted a detailed lantern, so started
  modelling in Moray. I quickly found that I had to go to straight POV code to
  do what I wanted, with blobs for the dragon claw feet and candlestick. After I
  had that, other bjects came to me.  The scroll was modelled using C++ for the
  mesh, then the scrolls in the back were modelled.  Almost everything else was
  done in Moray, though most objects had custom modifications to update the code
  to Megapov (adding isosurfaces for the wall and brushes, for example, and
  creating the wood floor, all of which was done in pov code directly)

  The designs on the bowl of rice and the bowl in the back were based upon Chinese,
  rather than Japanese designs, but similar things can be found in Japan.  The rice was
  simulated in Pov code, and though it can't be seen in this image, is made of individual
  grains that were allowed to clump together in more-or-less natural fashion, guided
  by a blob object of the basic shape I wanted.