TITLE: The Sewing Machine
NAME: Maurizio Tomasi
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mtsew.jpg
ZIPFILE: mtsew.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 

- Paint Shop Pro 7.0 (height field creation and JPEG conversion)

- sPatch 1.5 (a lot of objects)

- Anim8or 0.8, PoseRay 2.6.4 (conversion of the Horse model)

- Mathematica 4.0 (isosurface testing and height field rendering)


RENDER TIME: 

About 17 hours for the 2000x1800 image included in the ZIP file (in order
to print it in a poster).  This was rescaled using PSP 7 and saved as
"mtsew.jpg".

    
HARDWARE USED: 

        AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

        This is an image of a typical farm in the 1930s, as the one
where my great-grandparents lived with other families.  Every object
in the scene tries to evocate the life in that epoch: the sink with
the bucket used to fill it, the basin... the daily use of "old
technology".


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

- sewing machine: a lot of height fields, basic primitives (tori and
  cylinders) some CSG and sPatch objects

- walls: isosurfaces

- floor: height field

- scissors: height field

- chairs: the framework is a sPatch object, the straw is a set of
  sphere sweeps placed by a macro;

- clock: primitive objects (spheres, cylinders), height fields
  (hands);

- lantern: cones, cylinders, height fields, sphere sweeps and an
  isosurface for the glass and the wires around it;

- iron structure under the basin: isosurfaces and tori;

- shelf benches: isosurfaces;

- threads (on the sewing machine and under the chair): sphere sweeps;

- cart: primitive objects;

- straw (in the cart and the cowshed): sphere sweep objects randomly
  placed by a macro;

- basin, thimble, cloth on the chair, table, candlestick on the table,
  pot on the wall, dishes in the sink: sPatch object;

- horse: 3ds model I downloaded from the "3D cafe" website and
  converted to POV using Anim8or (3DS -> OBJ) and PoseRay (OBJ ->
  POV);

- illumination: a parallel area light outside the window, two area
  lights placed on the two window frames, some lights used to
  illuminate single objects (the sewing machine, the shelf, the pot
  hanged on the wall...), radiosity.

- the image reflected in the windows is a painting by Silvestro Lega,
  "Il pergolato" (the arbour), painted in 1868;

- the picture above the basin was taken in the late 1910s; see the
  "photo.jpg" and "photo.txt" file (both in the ZIP) file for more
  information.

Note: the "horse.inc" file was too big (about 3MB) and I decided not to
include it in the ZIP file.

Maurizio Tomasi