TITLE: The Red Balloon
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sks_redb.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    4h 33m 41s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon, 1.1 Ghz, 256 mg


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A gray room. An unglazed window. A red balloon.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The visible floor tiles were built
with one of two macros, depending on lighting and position.  The tiles in the
two closest patches of sunlight are height_fields (drawn with an ancient copy
of Photoshop, in order to get an assortment of cracks and wear patterns)
intersected with boxes, while the remainder of the visible tiles are boxes with
a crackle normal.  Each tile was then given a tiny, random bit of rotation
around x and/or z, scaling down, and -y translation.  (The unseen portions of
the floor, walls, and ceiling were built of unadorned blocks of 50% gray.)

The stone blocks for the walls were built with a macro that I've been fiddling
with, off and on, since the "Desert" competition, that creates a rough block by
building a rectangular mesh and then sort of hammering at it.  The mortar
between the stones in each wall is basically one big wall-sized box with a
concrete texture.

The main body of the red balloon is a blob.  The tail was built from a stack of
tiny flattened spheres, with a flattened torus at the end.  The main body
pigment is a gradient that is very slightly transparent at the widest part of
the balloon, where the material is stretched the most.  The finish is soft
(specular 0.75 roughness 0.06 metallic 0.225) and slightly reflective (0.025,
0.05).  The yellow grosgrain curling ribbon is a union of teensy flattened
cylinders, kept properly oriented with Reorient_Trans().

The assembled room was filled with a hollow, transparent box of scattering
media, in order to get the visible sunbeams.  The radiosity is pretty much
Radiosity_2Bounce, but with the count, nearest_count, and brightness tweaked up
just a bit.  I used Photoshop to add the copyright and title to the final image
and convert it to JPG.

An additional note--I decided to create three entries:  a representation of a
situation, comprising a bare minimum of objects and colors, that might be
considered minimalistic; a depiction of a piece of minimalist art in a museum
setting; and an image that, by virtue of the simplicity of both image and code,
might itself be considered minimalist art.  The resulting entries were,
respectively, "The Red Balloon," "Pericynthion," and "Magenta."