EMAIL: mhaynes@royell.net
NAME: Mike Haynes
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Ode to Hitchcock's "Vertigo"
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.royell.net/~mhaynes/
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5
TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro 6.0, Poser 4.0 
RENDER TIME: 13 minutes, 48 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 450 MHz 384 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
An ode to Hitchcock's "Vertigo". This scene is intended to depict Scottie's intense fear of heights that was so greatly challenged in the bell tower.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The biggest challenge was the creation of the staircase. I first decided that both the X component and Y component for each section of the stairs would be 12 units. Then I chose an upward 45 degree angle and used the hypoteneus to determine the actual length. I based the rest of the construction of the scene on the size of the stair sections and a width of 5. In fact, the size of the entire scene can be changed just by changing the X and Y components of the stair sections alone.

I wanted to cast the shadow of a falling figure and used Poser to create a quick model for just that purpose. Instead of importing the model however, I just used a GIF of the rendered Poser model as an image map with a transparent background to cast the shadow. It would have seemed rather silly to make the renderer go through all the work of parsing a 3D mesh just to cast a shadow of it.

All the other textures in the scene are from the POVRay Include Files. Paintshop Pro was used to convert the image map to GIF format and to convert the final render to JPEG, add my name, and resize the image.