EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
NAME: Robert Lee
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Home
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: POV 3.5
TOOLS USED: IFranView, PhotoShopLE,
POV 3.5, Plant Studio, FractInt,
Little Gray Cells

RENDER TIME: about 9 hrs
HARDWARE USED: 2.4 Ghz Pentium on Windows 2000

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This time around I wanted
to make an original picture with a modern theme.

The house is of my own original design.  I've
tried to incorporate themes of earthiness, 
harmony, and oneness through the use of earth
tones, torri, and cylinders.

This underground house represents the idea of home.
Not only is it a home to live in, but it reminds
us of our home in the universe.  There is a close
tie to nature as the universe is brought indoors
with the mural and sundial in the second level
entrance way.  Standing near the globe on the
lowest level and looking up provides access to
the outside world and the rest of the universe.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Three POV pictures were created and combined
into a single mosaic. I wish I could have 
developed more views of the lower level, but 
the 250K file size limit prevented additional
views.  Since the topic was Architecture and
time was at a premium, I did not go overboard 
with interior design, furniture, and other 
furnishings.

TOP PANEL:  This panel shows the outside of the 
house.  The sun is an area light.  The stones and
mailbox are superelipsoids.  The entrance tunnel
is a sphere sweep object differenced with a 
cylinder.

Thanks to Gilles Tran for his Makegrass macro.  
I created two different grass meshes and placed 
them at random around the house, avoiding the
actual area of the house.

Thanks to Jeremy Praay for his Weeds macro.  I 
created 2 different types of weed patches and
placed them near the house.

I used plant studio to design 2 different types of
flowers and distributed them in an arc around the 
house perimeter.

MIDDLE PANEL: This panel shows the house entrance
at the bottom of the entrance tunnel.  A sundial 
gnomon is suspended above to cast a shadow on the
sundial-inlaid floor.  An image map of the earth 
rising over the moon's horizon was mapped to the 
inside of a hollow cylinder.

The spiral staircase was developed as a macro using
trig functions and a little bit of math.  The
reflecting sphere on top of the staircase is
purely ornamental.

The mat between the entrance tunnel and the
house entrance is a sphere sweep object that is
scaled very small in the Y direction.

The telescope and sundial are pure CSG.

Sunlight enters from the top, through the large
glass window.  One additional shadowless light
is placed near the center of the floor to
brighten up the entrance way.

The second and third levels of the inside of the
house is a single include file, so that the view
from above and the view from below are consistent.

BOTTOM PANEL:  This panel shows the living area.
Since I only had space for one view, I decided
to place the camera near the globe in the central
area below the skylight and view part of the 
kitchen and living room.

I created the globe by starting with a GIF image
I found on the web.  The image was converted to 
an hf_gray_16 height field using POV. Then the
height field was recombined with an image map,
scaled, and remapped onto a sphere.

The bubble wall, separating the kitchen and 
livingroom, is a hollow box, ior 1.7, filled with 
spheres, ior 1.0, that are placed using an X-Y 
grid system that is perturbed to generate 
somewhat random deviations. The spherical bubbles
are filled with emitting media to make them look 
like they are lit from an unseen light source.

All the cupboards and cabinets are CSG objects.

The spiral lamp is based on the spiral staircase
macro.

The painting on the wall is an image map of a
fractal I made with FractInt.

The livingroom floor is a prism object textured
with an X-Z pigment map.  The kitchen floor is a
prism object with inlayed boxes textured as 
stones.

I used fairly high quality radiocity settings in 
the top and bottom panels.  The middle panel 
did not benefit much from radiosity.                

        pretrace_start 0.08
        pretrace_end   0.008
        count 400   
        error_bound 0.12
        recursion_limit 4  

IfranView was used to convert the POV PNG files to TGA 
files which were then copied into PhotoShopLE.  The 
combined image was cropped and saved as a jpeg file to 
meet file size requirements.