EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Small World
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: n/a
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (for signature and jpg compression only)
RENDER TIME: 2d 4h 43m 30s 
HARDWARE USED: 1.4 GHz Thunderbird; 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  A dollhouse within a dollhouse within a real house... meant to represent the world of a young girl's imagination that exists within the real world.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  Well, this is my longest render time ever (2+ days), mainly due to the lighting, it seems.  (During test renders, I had the area lights turned off, and the scene took about two and a half hours to render.  Then I turned them on for the final render and BAM!)  The sad part is that I suspect a lot of what I did with the lighting isn't really necessary... all lights are area lights, and all pass through reflective, refracting glass globes.  Oh, well, live and learn....

  I also realize I overreached myself on this one.  It seemed like a good idea when I thought of it, and I was excited to get going with it, but after a day or two it started to sink in how much work (and time!) is involved in creating twelve rooms filled with furniture.  But I'm way too stubborn to let common sense get in my way, so I kept going... and going... and going....  The result is that the scene lacks a lot of the small details I was hoping would make it more interesting.  

  The large room I'm pretty happy with, although the sofa looks too boxy.  The wallpaper (as with all my textures) is made in POV (take a spotted texture, apply repeat warps, and then use in a gradient texture.)  I did use it as an image map in the scene, though, so that the lighting would not affect the actual colorations (the gray sections of the design are the result of the normal of the texture, so they would be less uniform if the texture itself were used in the final scene.)  Everything else is either CSG or lathes.  The painting is one of my earlier entries into the competition (from the Sea round, July/August 2000, I think).  While it didn't do that well, it's always been a personal favorite of mine, and I felt it suited the scene.

  The dollhouse and all objects inside it are also CSG and lathes.  I also realized early on that I wouldn't be able to achieve the level of fine detail that I would have preferred for the dollhouse furniture.  (A good example is the piano keyboard in the living room... I searched the web for a diagram of an actual keyboard layout, created a while loop which placed all 88 keys correctly, and it looks like a simple white box would have been sufficient.)  This was both a blessing and a curse... while the scene would have benefitted from a lot of fine detail, I didn't have time to achieve more that a basic level of detail on most objects, anyway.  As it is, I'm a bit uncomfortable submitting such a large scene, and I apologize to anyone who needs to scroll around a lot to view it.  There was just no way to get enough detail to show up at a lower size.

  BTW, the lack of objects in the attic and the empty room are a result of running out of time, just in case anyone was wondering.

  That's about it for this time... thanks again to everyone for taking the time to provide comments/criticism.  (Unfortunately, I was unable to return the favor last round, due mainly to time constraints, but plan to do so this round.)  Good luck to all... see you next round!