EMAIL: bergerj@iname.com
NAME: Jerome BERGER
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Workshop
COUNTRY: France
WEBPAGE: http://www.enst.fr/~jberger
RENDERER USED: mPov 0.6.2 (http://www.enst.fr/~jberger/mpov/mpov.html)
TOOLS USED: paintshop pro, the gimp, moonlight atelier, spilin editor, gcc
RENDER TIME: parse: 6s, photons: 2m 35s, render: 8h 10m 47s
HARDWARE USED: P-II 333MHz, 64Mo RAM, Linux
VIEWING RECOMENDATIONS:
  Dark images show big variations from a computer to the next. According 
to the gamma test from www.povray.org, my computer has a gamma of about 
2.4. This makes the details of the cupboard at the back of the room 
barely visible.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  What would the great painters like Leonardo da Vinci have done with 
computers and 3D software? This picture shows the workshop of one such 
painter, to whom a computer has just been given...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  The first thing that came to my mind when thinking of art and contrast 
was the painting (and photo) style called "clair-obscur" in french (word 
for word, it would translate as "light-dark"). From there came the two 
ideas: to do a picture like that (which would allow me to work on lights 
in my pics) and to show another contrast: that between the tools used by 
those who invented this style and the tools we use for the IRTC.

  Nearly everything was hand-coded. The only exceptions are the hair of 
the round paintbrush (modelled in Moonlight Atelier) and the bottle (Spilin 
Editor) and those mostly because I needed an excuse to try these softs. The 
piece of cloth draped over the computer was generated by a small program I 
wrote in C++ and which I hope to develop into a full-fledged cloth cimulator 
later. I first wrote a scene file in which I placed colored boxes and 
played around with light sources and radiosity to get the effect I wanted. 
Then I modelled each object individually in separate include files and 
replaced the boxes with those. The picture of Mona Lisa was found on the 
web, the sphere-on-a-checkered-plane picture was made with pov (including 
focal blur, reflection blur...) and the signature was made in paintshop-pro 
(I have yet to configure my linux box to access TrueType fonts) and adjusted 
in the gimp.

  Isoblobs are a great feature too often overlooked. Even if their syntax 
could be better, they are a great modelling tool. All in all, I'm rather 
surprised that the picture didn't render more slowly: it uses radiosity, 
photons, media (both scattering and emission method 2), isolobs and 
isosurfaces...

  Most textures were taken from the povray.org newsgroups and then tweaked 
to suit my needs. I'd like to thank all the people who posted them so that 
others could learn.