EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
NAME: Peter Murray
TOPIC: The Laboratory
INTERPRETATION: "Glassware, boiling stuff in funny beakers, electric arcs,
vague organic shapes floating in cloudy liquid, telescopes,
microscopes, oscilloscopes, proctoscopes, the Mad Scientist! Any
area or equipment used mainly for scientific research."
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: In the Laboratory
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
COUNTRY: England
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC
TOOLS USED: Lots of books with pictures of equipment, windows,
    glassware and furniture
RENDER TIME: Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes   8.0 seconds (8 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    2 hours 38 minutes  36.0 seconds (9516 seconds)
    Total Time:    2 hours 38 minutes  44.0 seconds (9524 seconds)

RENDERING MUSIC: Monster Mash by Bobby (Boris) Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The mad scientist and his monster working in their
laboratory.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The first idea I had for this round was a mad scientist and his
laboratory, so I went with that idea.

First I made a POV model of a normal sort of house that might be found
in the village I've been using as a setting.  (None of the earlier
village setting is actually used in this file, but the house model will
be usable in it later.)  Then I remodelled the house, knocking rooms
together to form a laboratory/workshop setting.

Then I started improving the head on the human figure I've been using.
I didn't manage to get it as good as I'd imagined, though, and I
have hardly improved the body from earlier rounds.  (There are slight
changes to it.)

On the workbench behind the scientist are a metallic sculpture of an
early sketch for the head, a brain and a skull.  (I started from the
inside of the head, you see!)

Also present are various items of laboratory glassware, clustered
together behind the scientist and hence hard to see, a sink, some books
which are too small to read the jokes on, a stool I modelled for another
idea I had for this round, some shelves from an earlier round (visible
mostly in the window reflections), the windows themselves, and one of
the creatures from the Sea round, which is in that tank over on the right.
(Which seems to have been turned round between the test render and
now!  Augh!)  Oh, and the monster has cliche neck bolts :-) .

The pale patch at right isn't a strange bit of floor, it's a part of the
shelf unit almost visible at bottom right.

I always seem to finish rendering very close to the deadline - with
two hours to render, I don't have time to rearrange the objects better
and rerender.

And I forgot to include the object with the "credits" on!

The floorboards (which use warp) did come out better than they looked
in any of the test renders though!

I think the zip file contains all the files except the one for the
creatures in the tank, which is in the previous round's zip file anyway.
The file for the figure is badly-commented, as it's still unfinished.