EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Busted! --or-- A Demonstration of the Proper Use of the Combination Double-Barreled Roach Clip and Solar-Powered Lighter, a Great Invention of Our Time
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://snow.prohosting.com/tenmoons/ (under construction)
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Poser 4, PoseRay, Plant Studio, Photoshop, under Windows 2000
RENDER TIME: 1h 2m 39s
HARDWARE USED: Athlon, 1.1 Ghz, 256 mg

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:  Poor Dave.  Bored with life in the slow lane, he decided it was time to make a Big Political Statement.  Stocking up on dope and cheap beer, he picked the lock on Uncle Henry's vacation cabin in the scenic Ozarks, dragged in an old patio table for a workbench, and got down to work.  Having been left short of cash by his previous purchases, he was forced to make some compromises.  Dynamite was expensive and difficult to obtain, so he settled on a box of bottle rockets from Crazy Eddie's Fireworks Farm.  Then he managed to drop his lighter in the creek--but, while frantically searching for matches, he found Uncle Henry's double-barreled roach clip with attached solar-powered lighter.
     It would appear, however, that Dave's political career is about to draw to an abrupt close.  Over the next few years, in between picking up roadside trash, making license plates, and getting married to a guy named Vinnie, he'll have plenty of time to think of less-explosive ways of expressing his political views.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:  The Great Invention (aka stand magnifier, aka double-barreled roach clip) was built from lots and lots and lots of CSG; all the bendable parts can be posed.  "StandMag.inc" (the object itself) and "StandMag.pov" (a sample scene showing the use of some posing options) are included in the zip archive.
     In order to give some serious depth to the peeling paint layers on the grungy-looking table, I stacked three separate "planks" objects.  The bottom layer uses a wood texture, while the green and white paint layers use material_maps (drawn in Photoshop) with invisible (peeled away) and more-or-less solid areas.  The white paint layer incorporates a normal_map with areas of dents and crackle (for that blistered, you-should-have-sanded look).  The window frames have a layer of yellowing, blistered varnish made with a similar normal_map.
     The cheap-ass paneling was built using a macro that takes a wood texture, twists it around in various ways, and applies a different version to each of the fake boards.  The texture is translated a teensy bit in the z dimension on successive panels, to simulate veneer being peeled from a log, so that each sheet of paneling differs just a little from its neighbor (as on authentic working-class walls throughout the MidWest and MidSouth).
     The smoke is an invisible cylinder filled with scattering media in a spiral pattern.  The "holes" in the smoke, BTW, are where it's hit by the shadows of the window shade (out of sight above the right side) and the round pull-thingy on the end of the string.  The dope on the tray is a cluster of height_fields.  The wires are sphere_sweeps.  The map tacked up on the wall is a really thin box with a really big quilted normal.  The cop car that you can't see 'cause it's around the side of the house is just a couple of spotlights.  And the cop pounding on the front door is totally imaginary, but I know he's there.
     The image_maps for the brochures and map, the beer and bottle rocket labels, the notebook cover, and the souvenir dope tray were drawn in Photoshop.  The cop coming around the corner is Greg Crowfoot's "LawBoy" character (Poser3, from www.greylight.com) with the PD cap replaced by a Smoky hat (same source) and other minor changes, converted to POV format with PoseRay.  The shrub behind him was made with Gilles Tran's "MakeTree" file (www.oyonale.com); the books in the milk crate were made with a version of his "MakeBook" macro, modified to accept a bunch of parameters and to add the title to the front cover.  The potted plant in the window was made with Plant Studio (www.kurtz-fernhout.com).
     The final image used radiosity and an area_light for a nice, slow render.  (I set ambient_light to 0.05, rather than to 0, and cranked up the ambient value on the glowing numbers on the little kitchen timer, so that I could have my cake and eat it, too.)
     I used Photoshop to add the title, copyright, and email lines, and to convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (72 DPI, quality 10).