TITLE: We Break The Glass
NAME: Paul T. Dawson
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.voicenet.com/~ptdawson
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: we-break.jpg
ZIPFILE: we-break.zip
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.00 for DOS
TOOLS USED: DOS Edit, PhotoFinish, Coffee
RENDER TIME: About 3 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD 486-120 with 20 megs RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
The scene is based on the song "Showroom Dummies".
It shows the dummies starting to move, breaking the glass, going out
into the city, and then going into a club and starting to dance! :-)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The first design goal was to make the scene completely gray, with
lots of shadows, and -no- garish colors. :-)

The song "Showroom Dummies", by Kraftwerk, provided the inspiration.
Of course, the critical words in the song are:

        "We break the glass"

There are many pieces of glass in the scene. The unbroken windows are
made with individual panes. The jagged broken window is made with four
polygon objects (and random numbers). The broken glass on the sidewalk
is actually one hundred "Chrome" triangles. I couldn't use a glass
texture there, because that wasn't very visible.

The wall is built from individual blocks, all arranged with ASCII code
modeling, right in the POV file. It would have been easier to use a
brick texture, but I wanted the "half blocks" (next to the windows and
doors) to look right. Check the source code to see how I did this!

There are over ten lights in the scene, to make lots of shadows. For
easy testing, I used -one- bright light, at the camera location. There
is a switch at the top of the file to select Final_Lights=on/off.

Two of the streetlights are visible, on the far sidewalk. There is one
more streetlight, over to the right of the camera. It isn't visible,
but it does make some nice shadows on the wall!

There are several imagemaps, including the lettering on the awning,
the spray paint on the road, the club sign, and one shirt design.

The road is a PNG heightfield, with a bumpy mirror box to create
water in the potholes. The left side door uses a GIF heightfield,
on the lower panel. Both of those files were drawn by hand.

The -dummies- (NOT people) are made with my P4 people include file.
Although they are still rather klunky, this time they are totally
realistic, because they are dummies, not people! 8-) The main people
include file has one minor change, Lip_Texture. That's so I could use
gray shaded lips, instead of the default Red.

There's a little bit of fog in the scene. I would have liked to add
a complete atmosphere, with visible light streaming out of the windows,
but the deadline is here TODAY, so I'll leave it as simple fog.

The sidewalks are made from individual superellipsoids. Each one gets
a tiny random wiggle, so they aren't all perfectly aligned.

All of the source code is in the ZIP. The main scene is fairly well
organized, with scene switches to turn items on/off. Some of the code
is rather wasteful (memory wise). For example, the glass and dividers
in the upper windows go all the way across the scene. You can only see
the parts where there is a hole in the wall. Sloppy!

The final scene was done with AA threshold at 0.3, and depth 2x2.
It uses just over 8 megs of POV memory.

Well, there it is! Thanks for reading all this!

P.T.D.
February 28, 1997