EMAIL: admccorm@mines.edu
NAME: Adam D. McCormick
TOPIC: Music
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Music is Life
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: http://www.mines.edu/students/a/admccorm/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.61 (Linux)
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray for Windows, Adobe Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 5 hours
HARDWARE USED: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
 The basic idea is that without the music of our lifes, our lives mean nothing. This scene
 shows a 3-Dimensional musical staff flying through space and, in an explosion of inspiration,
 generating a helix of life. This image was created to show the passion that music brings to
 my life and the void that exists before life begins

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
 Staff:
  I first defined several primitive to represent musical notes in three dimensions. I also defined
  rounded boxes to be linked together for staff pieces. I then defined a macro to position these
  staff pieces and notes at any point in space using vectors for placement, rotation, and orientation
  and scalar values representing note length and pitch.

  I used the "experimental" spline primitive to define the three vector splines to be used with my
  macro. Each of these is a "natural_spline" so that the end points are interpolated. One 
  interpolates the staff's position, one interpolates the rotation vector, and the last interpolates
  the orientation of the staff. I used some arbitrary modulous operations to set up the list of 
  notes used to place them upon the staff, then placed one note manually to ensure a note is seen in
  the foreground.

 Helix and Explosion:
  To create the helix, I used a blob model containing 200 spheres ber branch and every fifteen spheres
  I created a bridge between the branches made of cylinders. To place these I rotated them around a
  line at intervals calculated to pass through four rotations.

  Through the center of the helix, I defined a cylinder with the interior attribute set up to look
  like a beam of light. To accomplish this, I defined a density map which made roughly 3/4 of the 
  cylinder appear to be filled. Then I added a similarly defined sphere and very thin cylinder 
  to represent the explosion of life and music at the point of coincidence between the helix and the
  staff spline.

  This initially made a section which was distractingly bright and particularly out of place. I then
  Removed the cylinder and ended up with with the complete image.

Finalizing the image
  Photoshop was used to save the image w/ reduced quality to reduce the file size to acceptable levels
  for submission. Images included in ZIP archive (including the files called final) are not retouched 
  or altered from the output of POV-Ray.