EMAIL: sporadic@core.com
NAME:  Geoff Wedig
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION
           COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Summoning
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: Megapov 0.6a
TOOLS USED: Poser 3, UV-Mapper, 3dWin, Moray 3.3
RENDER TIME: 1 day, 22 hours.
HARDWARE USED: PIII, 800 Mghz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  "Seven torches burn eternally in the seven sided room.
  Today, something new burned, red and malevolent, casting
  no light but what she saw within her sight.  She didn't
  want to do this.  It shouldn't have to be done.  But it
  did and she would, and things would never be the same
  again."

I imagine there will be many abstract pieces in this round, 
so I went for the meta-contrast of doing something (semi-) 
realistic.  I went for several levels of contrast, though, 
both in the conceptual (Good/Bad, Heaven/Hell), and the 
stylistic (Light/Dark, Shiny/Muted).  Originally, I had 
intended to do this in Black and White, heighting the 
countrast, but found the image too bland that way, so added 
spashes of intense color, thus adding a nice B&W/Color 
contrast as well.

There are also some other subtle contrasts based on viewer 
expectation.  The room (as mentioned above) is seven sided, 
as is the symbol drawn on the ground (a septagram), rather 
than the more common and expected pentagram.  Although the 
symbol glows, it casts no light.  This was intentional, as 
it is meant to reflect the magical sight of the two 
characters rather than an actual physical presence.  
Similarly, the angel's coloring uses values greater than 1, 
giving her the effect of glowing relative to her 
surroundings, though she too casts no light.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

As with all my images, I write a lot of code to 
automatically generate objects for me.  The back walls, for 
example, were made originally with an iso-surface modified 
mur.inc (non-pov-ers, that's a library for POV).  I found 
this inadequate and wrote my own stone wall generator which 
operates much more intelligently, giving much more control 
(I'm planning on releasing it as a library).  In fact, all 
background objects, with the exception of the torches were 
generated using isosurfaces generated by this macro.

The characters were primarily done in Poser 3, including 
the angel's wings, which were borrowed from a posable swan 
figure.  The demon's horns and wings, on the other hand, 
were generated in straight Megapov code using spherical 
splines and programatically derived meshes (ie, POV 
calculates the points on the mesh)