EMAIL: hamburg@fas.harvard.edu
NAME: Mike hamburg
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: ASCII POV
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://capricorn.dnsalias.org/ once I rebuild it.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6.1
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.6.1, libcaca, The Gimp, ImageMagick to JPEG it.
RENDER TIME: About 6 hours.
HARDWARE USED: Toshiba A55 (PM 1.5GHz); 1.8GHz Mac G5 for final render
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A laptop (rather similar to the A55 used for most of the dev work)
raytracing a checkered sphere in a text console.

The Windows and Menu keys on the laptop are blanked.  The laptop is
not, of course, running Windows and it seemed odd to put the keys
there.  So I left them blank.

There is also a minimalist poster on the wall, based on Barnett
Newman's painting /The Word II/.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

All done in POV-Ray, except for the screen image.  The screen image is
based on a simple checkered sphere rendered in Pov, converted to ASCII
with libcaca, and modified in The Gimp to include the top and bottom
text lines.

The keys are frustums of bezier prisms, differenced with an elliptical
cylinder to get their surface.  The text on the keys is done by
union/difference with text rendered in Arial Bold (not included in
sources for copyright reasons, but it should be available on your
computer).  This technique is slow to render, but easy to implement.
The keys are slightly shinier in the middle from wear, but this
doesn't show up because they aren't illuminated from the opposite side
(except by the screen, which is essentially ambient anyway).

The rest of the system is mostly prisms and simple CSG:
superellipsoids and tori for the screen pads and similar details,
prisms for the hook, CSG with cones and boxes (differencing out prisms
and tori) for the media keys, prisms and CSG for the pencil, CSG with
half-tori and cylinders for the paper clips.

The textures were more difficult.  The plastic is made dusty by a
granite pattern, layered on a scaled bozo for scuffs.  (Unfortunately,
this dust didn't really survive JPEG compression).  The poster is a
turbulated gradient / texture map, and the metal for the paper clips
is a bozo with some tarnish.  I used a few woods and metals from the
standard includes for the steel, the pencil tip, and the wood veneer
table (veneering done with a gradient map, with a tiny amount of
turbulence to make the lines not quite match up).  You may recognize
T_Wood1 on the table; it so happens that the table I was working on to
model this looked almost exactly like a T_Wood1 veneer, so I didn't
try to improvise my own wood texture.

There are 3 light sources: a fluorescent light on the far left, an
incandescent desk lamp right and behind, and an incandescent ceiling
lamp above and right.  These are all area lights, which is the most
computationally expensive part of the rendering (although the keyboard
and the wood veneer give it competition).  Additionally, the screen is
very slightly luminescent, but this doesn't change much (I wonder if I
even did it right...).

The entire thing was then JPEGged with ImageMagick's convert utility.

I'm not entirely sure the sources are the exact same as the image,
because I was going to render another one tonight, and had made some
changes, but decided I'd rather just submit it as is.  There is only
so long that I can tie up the family computer (the G5 I was using for
the heavy lifting).

I was quite impressed by the G5's computational power.  The Pentium M
is a very efficient architecture with a large cache, but the G5
rendered this image much, much faster despite its only marginally
higher clock speed.