EMAIL: sloan@geosim.msfc.nasa.gov NAME: Steve Sloan II TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: "Recess": A Scene From "Night Court" HOMETOWN: Hartselle, Alabama, USA WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uah.edu/cs/students/ssloan/ RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.02, SPatch, Corel Draw 7, hand-coding RENDER TIME: A few hours (I forgot to check the time) HARDWARE USED: 486 DX4-100 with Win 95 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a portrait of a magician. The Honorable Judge Harold T. Stone, of the Manhattan Criminal Court Part 2 (the Night Court) is a rather unorthodox judge, but he's also an accomplished magician. He loves nothing better than wowing the lawyers and bailiffs with magic tricks and pranks. His idols are Harry Houdini and Mel Torme. One of his biggest magic tricks was ALMOST escaping from a safe, like his hero Houdini. He loves clothes and music from the forties, a time the Assistant DA, Dan Fielding, calls "a bygone and best-forgotten era." He also likes weird knicknacks. His stuffed armadillo, Clarence, is usually on Harry's desk in his office, but occasionally, he ends up in some weird places. This scene is set during court recess, when Harry has taken a break. He left some of his stuff on the judge's bench. You can see his hat, the book he's currently reading, Clarence, his gavel, and a pen in its holder. He's reading the book, "How to Escape a Safe" by Harry Houdini (I made up the book title. I don't think that's a real book), to prepare for his next attempt. If you squint, you can see a Mel Torme bookmark in his book. The hat is a style from the forties. "Night Court" was a situation comedy from the eighties. It's also one of my favorite shows, because of its offbeat humor. It's almost like an "Airplane" movie set in a court room, full of sight gags, puns, and even some drama. It starred Harry Anderson as the judge. In real life, Harry started out as a magician, before he became an actor. On stage, and in the show, he usually wears the hat. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: When I first heard that the topic would be Magic, I thought about Clarke's Law: "A sufficienty advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I thought of applying that law to the Arabian Nights, to create a kind of techno-Arabia, complete with high-tech-looking minarets, and a flying carpet that uses technology to fly. Then, I saw a rerun of "Night Court," and it made me realize that I could do a "Night Court" scene. It gave me an excuse to practice on an indoor scene, which is something I haven't really tried before. I'm very proud of the hat. I created it in just a few minutes with sPatch, an excellent utility for creating objects out of bezier patches. I borrowed the felt texture from a couple of postings about furry and soft textures I founbd in the comp.graphics.rendering. raytracing newsgroup. I'm also very proud of Clarence. I took his measurements from an illustration of a 9-banded Texas armadillo in an old dictionary. His head and body are made from CSG operations with spheres, cones and planes. His legs and feet are made from blob objects. They're articulated, so you can set the kneebend angles. I made several trials to see what the most realistic angles would be. His tail is made from dozens of linked cones, set to follow any parametric function I decide to use. I used a simple scaled circle function, with sine and cosine, but it can be easily modified to use more complex functions. I know real armadillo tails drag on the ground, but the real Clarence on the show was stuffed with his tail curving over his head. The gavel is made of two lathe objects. The pen and holder was made of a lathe object, a sphere, and a cylinder. I used one of the metal textures that came with POV to create the pen holder. The book is made of simple CSG objects and image maps. I found the picture of Harry Houdini in chains, the Houdini signature, and the picture of Mel Torme on the web, and created the text in Corel Draw 7. I did some post-processing on the image maps using Corel PhotoPaint 7, LView Pro, and Irfan View. The lights are an attempt to mimic the lighting on the actual courtroom set. There are two lights on the wall behind the desk, off to the sides. Bull the bailiff (played by Richard Moll) is 6'8", and stands just beneath one of the lights, so I know the lights are about 7 feet off the floor. All the wood in this scene comes from POV's standard include files. Except for the hat, everything in this scene is hand-coded. One more thing. With the label I placed on the image, I tried to mimic the text shown during the opening credits of the show. The show uses yellow text. The title screen uses a handwritten font, which looks an awful lot like the Staccato font, so that's what I used for "Night Court." The actors are introduced with an italicized, all-caps font, which looks like the Verdana font I used for the rest of the text.