TITLE: Magic of the Imagination
NAME: Sonya Roberts
COUNTRY: CanadaWEB PAGE:        http://webhome.idirect.com/~sonyar


EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: attic.jpg
ZIPFILE: attic.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.02 watcom.Win32 Pentium Optimised

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to add file info and convert to JPG, and
for
         creation of image and material maps and some height fields.
         Texture Magic 0.95 for creation of some of the textures
         "boards", "books", and "trees" plugins
         sPatch for creation of many of the objects shown
         John Beale's HF-Lab and orb-cyl, for creation of the distant
                mountains and of the big stone.

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours, 30 minutes, 8 seconds for 37,363 objects

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200 w/64 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg
Graphics Card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Young Johnny has fallen asleep on the old green couch in the attic
after happily reading some of the many books stored up there.  Now
the creatures and creations of his vivid imagination are breaking
free for a little while.  A unicorn, a sword in a stone, a crystal
ball, a distant wyvern flying above wierd grey mountains that
probably teem with forgotten caves and nasty monsters.  Saddly,
they'll disapear without trace when he wakes, because, like dreams,
many of the most magical things we can imagine don't exist in the
real world.

Though...hmmm...that poster on the wall near the unicorn shows that
sometimes the universe can still surprise us with an unexpectedly
magnificent, near-magical view.  Who needs a crystal ball to see
into the future, when we have the Hubble Space Telescope to show
us the awesome majesty of creation by the light of stars of millenia
past?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Well, I did my "real" entry for this round (discwrld) and then
decided it was once again time to try out a whole pile of different
modellors and utilites in the hope of finding some I liked.  Among
the many I tried was sPatch...

I ***LIKE*** sPatch.

This scene basically evolved out of two things: salvaging the nice
attic I made for the picture I never completed for the Math & Physics
round, and playing with sPatch.  Repeatedly, and with great enjoyment.

I can now really understand why the list I have that's entitled "You
Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long When..." includes an entry about
"You install Windows95 on your computer just so you can use sPatch".
This software is EXCELLANT for making organic shapes.  It's very easy to
use and I can hardly wait for another version with more and better
features to come out (it's wonderful, but not, saddly, perfect).

ANYWAY...the unicorn, dressmaker's dummy, couch, cushions, blanket, and
wyvern are all sPatch-created objects.

The tree outside the window is of course created using my trees plugin,
and the stacks of books by my books plugin.

The carpet is an image-mapped heightfield, as is the poster on the wall.
The image on the poster, BTW, is clipped from an image of M16 (Eagle
Nebula, if I recall correctly) from the Hubble Space Telescope
publicly-released pictures site.  If you want to seem some magical
pictures, you should look at some of the incredible stuff the HST has
seen.

The child's head and hand (the only parts of him that actually exist)
are made of blobs, modifed from Rincewind, whom I made for the discwrld
scene.

The sword in the stone is just a bunch of CSGs, and is a slightly
modifed version of the one Cohen is carrying in the discwrld image.

The stone is made using John Beale's orb-cyl utility to wrap a height
field around a sphere.  The distant mountains are a height field created
with his HFLab utility.

The attic itself is made of several sets of boards arranged using a small
plugin I did called, appropriately, "boards", that makes a rectangular
array of boards with the setting of just a few variables.  It's included
in my zip file, and should shortly be appearing on my POV-Stuff site, with
docs.

The table and the crystal ball is just from simple CSGs.

Did I say how much I like sPatch?  Go, get it, use it! It's at
http://users.aimnet.com/~clifton/spatch/spatch.html