EMAIL: rfitzel@rogers.com
NAME: Rob Fitzel
TOPIC: From Rubbage Bin to Junkyard
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Dare
COUNTRY: Canada
WEBPAGE: www.fitzel.ca/dart
RENDERER USED: MegaPov 1.2.1
TOOLS USED: Wings 3D 0.98.32a, DAZ|Studio v1.3.0.1, PoseRay v3.8.18, Paint Shop Pro 8, Sanrope ColorPicker PRO 3
RENDER TIME: 2h 19m
HARDWARE USED: AMD64 4800+ 3GB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Arthur was the night janitor at the Museum of Modern Art. His wife thought most of the artwork there was pure garbage. One day, she dared her husband to do something mischievous. So, the next evening, he complied: Art could not refuse the dare to add refuse to the art. (Sorry, I like puns!)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The idea for a pile of garbage in an art museum was somewhat inspired by a visit many years ago to the National Gallery in Ottawa. I came across a pile of garbage posing as art. I wondered if anyone would notice if I were to add my beat up running shoes to the pile...

Most of the work for this image went into the modeling and positioning of the garbage. The tire, toy horse, the shoe, the elbowpad, and the Janitor were either free or commercial models; everything else was modeled by me. The styrofoam containers, cardboard boxes, and the fork were modeled in Wings 3D and converted to mesh2 format using PoseRay. Everything else is CSG.

In hindsight, I would probably have modeled more of the garbage in Wings because it's easier to translate and rotate the objects visually. Doing that with CSG objects involves a lot of trial and error.

The Janitor is a Michael 3 model from DAZ, with dress shirt, pants, shoes, and suspenders from his 3 piece suit product. 

The wood floor is a macro, first made for my IRTC entry "Ipod in D minor." I struggled a lot with the blurred reflection on the floor and  getting it to look good with radiosity. I swapped back and forth between POV-Ray's average texture_map trick and MegaPov's motion blur. In the end, I got the former method to work. I stuck with MegaPov though, to take advantage of the no_radiosity tag for some image_maps and to experiment with some (subtle) aoi textures for the Janitor's skin.

The works of art in the background: The three striped image I call "Whisper of Fire" - a small version of "Voice of Fire," for which the National Gallery paid $1.76 million in 1990. The exclamation print is not based on any work that I know, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a work existed. A museum would probably have spent thousands of millions of dollars on it.

The "My Junkyard" sign was added shortly before the deadline. I'm not entirely happy with it, but the composition needed something to balance the janitor. Perhaps it makes the image literally "from rubbage bin to junkyard." The lights and radiosity aren't quite right, but I ran out of time to get them just so. Another (quite literally) last minute decision was a title for the image!

More info and details at: http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/