EMAIL:  SSchanevil@aol.com
NAME:  Steve Schaneville
TOPIC:  Physics & Math
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:  Mouse Trap
COUNTRY:  USA
WEBPAGE:  None
RENDERER USED:  Povray 3.0
TOOLS USED:  Moray 2.5, PhotoStyler SE, CogMaker 1.0, Worm 0.4b, and WordPad 1.0
RENDER TIME:  3h, 44m
HARDWARE USED:  Pentium-90 w/ 32Mb ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

First, if you cannot tell what is on the balance under the cage (as none of my friends could), look at the shadow on the wall before you read on... The mouse comes out and sees Miss Right and scrambles up the stairs for a kiss.  The balance lowers (and rises) tipping the marble onto the button, turning on the motor. The motor pulls the scissors shut, dropping the cage over the mouse.  The pennies on the other side of the scale are just to counteract the weight of the female mouse.  I only explain all this in case the picture isn't that good!

I thought about putting a 5 lb. weight on the string instead of the cage.  Would that have been funnier? (or funny to begin with?)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Lets see, the tougher things... The springs on the battery are made of 360 spheres each.  Worm 0.4b will place these in 3d space just fine, but not in Povray format.  Editing a text file with 360 sphere w/ bad syntax took some time (actually Find/Replace helped a lot, but it still was slow going).

The red wires were a chore.  Moray will not allow you to edit beizer patches while still viewing the rest of the scene (I'm not complaining, the program is great), so snaking those wires around scene objects took some trial and error (lots of error).

The Energizer texture-map was made on PhotoStyler SE (from scratch).  I simply looked at a real battery (it was a D size... I'm not at all sure that 6V Energizers look the same, but it seems to work).

CogMaker 1.0 was used to make the walls, um, I mean the uh, you figure it out.  I did some minor tweeking and a lot of playing with texture changes.  This was pretty easy.

The cage was the easiest, thanks to the wonders of the Moray Copy command.

I must come clean, I stole the scissors from http://www.meshmart.org.  After trying to model them for hours, I managed to find the RAW file on the net in only 20 minutes with the search word "scissors".  I did do the texture though, and am quite pleased with it, as I usually find that creating the right texture is MUCH harder than creating the right model.

All objects were modeled specifically for this contest (well, except the scissors I guess).  In the zip file I've included all, every, 100%, of the files you need to trace and/or edit this picture... except Povray and Moray.  In order to trace the picture, you must edit "povtrace.bat" to reflect where your copy of povray is located.  Then simply run "go.bat".  Don't worry about library paths or anything else, it should work fine.  Also, the Moray file is included.  It may not be able to find the "scissors.udo" file though.  Thanks for reading through this...

- Steve