TITLE: The Turn of the Screw NAME: Maurizio Tomasi COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78 TOPIC: Mistery COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mtscrew.jpg ZIPFILE: mtscrew.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 (final render) and MegaPOV 1.0 for Windows TOOLS USED: - Paint Shop Pro 7.0 (height field creation, title, JPEG conversion) - PoseRay 2.6.6.202 - Poser 4 - sPatch 1.5 - GNU Guile 1.6.1 (my own Windows 2000 recompile) RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James is a novel whose main character is a young governess appointed to look after two children, Miles and Flora, which live in an old country house. After her arrival to the mansion, some puzzling events make her think that two ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, haunt the house trying to corrupt the two children. The main interest of the novel lies in its ambiguity. It is not possible to determine whenether the ghosts are real or a creation of the girl's mind, since she is the only one which interacts with them: Miles, Flora and the servants never see -- or admit to see -- Quint nor Miss Jessel. This should not force the reader to think that she's crazy -- only that this hypotesis cannot be excluded. You can find a detailed analysis of the text at http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/screw/summ1.html. The image was mainly inspired by the following passage, although I chose not to reproduce the text faithfully: "I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I knew that there was a figure on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where, at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me..." (Chapter IX) The image shows the moment when the lady sees Quint on the stairway, and instinctively draws back while turning to Miles sleeping in his bedroom. After last round there has been a little debate on the IRTC newsgroup whenether or not write a detailed interpretation of the entries in the text file. After some thoughts I decided not to explain the composition in detail: the viewer's sensitivity will be enough. A good starting-point is to consider how warm and cold colors are used in the image. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: * Overall layout I drew at least three different sketches before actually beginning to write POV code. It was difficult to choose a reasonable architecture for what I had in mind: first I considered another passage in the book (chapter IV), where Quint appears behind one window of the dining-room. After having chosen the actual passage, I thought of an asymmetric stairway (it turned like a "U"). This was not satisfactory, since Peter Quint's shadow would have been hardly visible. I drew another sketch which was very similar to the actual image, and this was quite good: the new stairway (forking like an "Y") allowed a larger landing halfway where to place Quint. * Parquet I wrote a Scheme program named "parquet.scm" to create "parquet.inc" (which contains the set of floor woodbricks). A description of how to use it is included at the beginning of the source code. * Carpets They are made by a very thin box with a layered texture (using bozo and dents patterns) placed into a larger box with a rectangular hole in it (to create the red border). No image maps are used. The threads are sphere sweeps randomly placed by a macro. * Walls The wall texture is an image map in the top part (I took inspiration from a little jevel-case owned by my aunt); the bottom part is a functional texture (if there had been more light, this texture would have looked ugly! But in this case it works quite well). * Lamp-holders Lamp-holders are made by two heightfields. The lamp glass and support are meshes created with sPatch. An area light is placed inside the glass bowl. The flame is an isosurface filled with emitting media (see lamps.inc for details). There is an emitting sphere centered into the lamp glass to get a faint glow. * Bed I used the symcloth feature of MegaPOV 1.0 applied to an height field (bed_hf.png, in the zip file). Miles' head is a Poser model, while the pillow is an sPatch model manually placed under the head (hardest than it sounds!). The bed head and tail (are these the correct english names?) are height fields (I used the same technique of my old "Sewing Machine"). The truck is pure CSG. * Table in the foreground The table is a prism. The granite surface uses the same prism vertexes with a sphere sweep running along the border to soften the edges. The vase and the candles are sPatch models (each candle has its own model). Flowers are pure isosurfaces (!). I applied a quasi-spherical transformation to a function with many spikes and added an agate pigment to increase randomness (see the "CreateRose" macro and the various comments in "rose.inc"). * Table on the left of the door Basic primitives. The vase with flowers is a 3DS model I found on the 3DCafe' website. * The shadow on the wall It is a box with a partially transparent image_map (leopold.png in the zip file). I drew the silhouette with PSP starting from a portrait of Leopold I King of Belgium by Lievin Dewinne (1822-1880). * Painting on the wall "The island of dead", by the swiss painter Arnold Boecklin (1827-1901). I think it is an appropriate painting to be placed above Quint's shadow. * Two small portraits on the right of the door The upper portrait is a photo of my sister Flavia. The lower portrait is a painting by Theodore Gericault ("The mad" -- a reference to the lady?). * Lady Two weeks ago I bought Poser 4.0 and decided to create a model of the girl to place in this scene (during the first month I worked on the image supposing it was seen through the girl's eyes). I worked quite hard to create an XIX century dress using only the built-in props! For the gown texture I used a carpet image both as image_map and bump_map; for the shirt I used only a bump_map in order to get those wrinkles. Hairs by Gerald Day (http://www.fast3d.co.uk). I placed one of the two candles on the table in the lady's hand. I simply loaded it into Poser as a DXF file and used it as a prop. To correctly place the light source on the candletop I assigned a bright green texture to it and searched in the POV mesh file for the triangles using this texture. Then, I noted down the coordinates and removed these triangles. * Lights Apart the two lamps, there are six other light sources: (1) a light coming from outside and projecting Peter Quint's shadow on the wall (area spotlight), (2) a light entering Miles' room and illuminating the bed, (3) a point light on the stairways (it adds nice shadows to the banisters), (4) a point light placed where the observer is (it lights up a bit the table) (4) the candle hold by the young lady and (5) a blue light illuminating the bed curtains (in a light_group). The zip file does not contains the Poser model, some image maps and many .inc files that can be created by the sPatch files. But the POV code is all there. There is also a larger image (2560x2048), see poster.jpg. Maurizio Tomasi