EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
NAME: Norbert Kern
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Nature vs. Rectangles
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: sorry, not yet
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1g / MegaPov 0.6A
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, WebLabViewerLite 3.5, 3DWin, 3D-Exploration, 3ds2pov, 
            OBJuvPOV, GLView, Poser 4, Polyview, Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 16 h 48 min / 407 MB peak memory
HARDWARE USED: PII, 266 MHz, 224 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The image demonstrates the contrast between the stringent, often 
rectangular forms which humans prefer and the organic, randomly curved or even fractal
shapes of nature. 
First there is a building with exclusively rectangular architecture ("Neue Staatsgalerie" in
Berlin, built in the sixties by Mies van der Rohe). As the counterpart i choose a complex
formed sculpture. Actually its a RNA molecule, a part of a ribozyme.
Nature has its own ways to deal with rectangles, as an example by distorting them over 
time. To visualize this, i positioned the flagstones on the great podest plane with small, 
but somewhat annoying irregularities. Perhaps because of this a woman has worry with one 
of her heels?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This is my first IRTC entry. Up to now, i used povray mainly to render "naked" molecules,
because i am a chemist. I am using povray since two years.

The central building was mostly made with moray or by handwritten macros (my fist ones).
I took only a few parts from a coarse model of the building, found on 
http://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html. The model was converted from its 3dmf-format to
a 3ds-file by 3D-Exploration, which is a really helpful program. Then i imported the 
3ds-file to Moray for positioning, creating camera, lights and so on. The real export 
from 3ds to pov-format i made with 3ds2pov because of the awful texturing otherwise needed
in Moray with eyery single object.
The roof is a macro in order to play efficient with a whole bunch of variables.
Since the flagstones schould show some irregularities, i spent much time on the creation.
My first trials with normals, imagemaps or even heightfields faild completely. So i
wrote my first macro. It positions the flagstones with random contributions to the x-, y- 
and z-angles in addittion to a random translation in z-direction (z is up). The effect 
works good with a maximum deviation of +-0.5° and ca. 3 cm. Then I created a box with a
brown-green, but mostly transparent texture. The flagstoneparts, which lie above this box
are unaffected and on the lower parts some stain can be seen. The effect works quite good,
but would be much better with some kind of media (time was running out).

The plastic is a representation of a RNA molecule. The structure data are from 
http://www.rcsb.org (PDB ID: 1GRZ). RNA ist similar to DNA, but is much more irregular
formed. Most of the molecule is shown in the "ladder"-representation, in the lower parts
of the plastic the individual atoms are visualized. This work is done with the 
WebLab ViewerLite 3.5 from imsi.com. I exported the data as a vrml-file, which was
converted to 3ds-format and so on like described above.
The combination of the organic plastic and the rectangular environment is made with an
somewhat irregular geodasic dome, found on http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~nj2t-hg/ilpov29e.htm.
It looks beautiful in an bigger image formate with a gold texture.

The trees are modified (many many hours) "Tomtrees" (http://www.aust-anfertigungen.de).
The complexity varies with the best quality in the foreground tree and the lowest in the 
hidden and mirrored trees. Despite the variation, the whole 14 trees alone consume more than 
200 MB of memory, but i love tomtrees.

There are another 4 buildings, which show other architectural ways of dealing with rectangles.
From the left: "Saynatsalo Town Hall" from Finland, "High Museum of Art" from Atlanta, 
"Neue Staatsgalerie" from Stuttgart and finally the Chartres cathedrale, the queen of all 
gothic churches. They are more or less simple models, downloaded from 
http://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html and transported to povray like described above. I made
only minor modifications, mostly on the textures. I played with different bricks-imagemaps 
for the left building in the background, but finally a simple granite normal was good enough
(normal antialiasing shows the effect better).

Not much to say about the figures. The woman, the man on the bike, the cat and the tiny 
little mouse on the lowest step are imported from Poser with the aid of OBJuvPOV (donīt 
forget to switch left and right before exporting from poser). Again, the obj-files are 
positioned with Moray.
There are also some simple peoplelike csg-shapes in the gallery and on the steps in the 
background.

Finally the gallery is filled with water molecules, disordered like in real water. The 
pdb-file is from http://www.kindred.k12.nd.us/Molecular_Vis/face2face.htm. It was converted
with WebLab ViewerLite and GLView to a RAW-file. This was imported in Moray and copied three
times to fill some empty parts of the room.

The rest are dozens of night sessions with a neverresting computer.
Hope, my English was understandable enough.
obj-file from poser is positioned in Moray