TITLE: Chromatic Scale NAME: Aaron Gage COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: agage@mines.edu WEBPAGE: http://www.mines.edu/students/a/agage TOPIC: Art and Entertainment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: amgchrom.jpg ZIPFILE: amgchrom.zip RENDERER USED: POVray 3.0 for Linux TOOLS USED: None RENDER TIME: 23 02 58 on a borrowed Pentium 200Mhz MMX HARDWARE USED: i486DX2/66 with 20 Megs RAM under Linux 2.0.28 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: There are two definitions of "chromatic": of or relating to color, and the progression by half steps of the musical scale. Since the topic was Art and Entertainment, and to me, the piano is both of these, I thought I'd try to bring out both definitions of the chromatic scale in my image. This piano is a bit different than most -- it could be a grand piano, except for the fact that the strings are held vertically by a pair of arches. Around each string is its unique color, determined by the note and the octave. The painting on the wall to the left of the strings is a work of Maxfield Parrish (1870-1962) entitled "The Young King of the Black Isles", which was created in 1906. More information about this work is at the end of the next section. Based on the nature, age, and availability of this particular work, I am making the assumption that it is in the public domain; that is, that I am not in violation of copyright by using this image. U.S. Code, Title 17 - Copyrights states that the term of copyright for visual art shall consist of the life of the author. This work is also available in various forms, including postcards, calendars, and unregulated electronic media. If, despite this evidence, the use of this painting in my scene is viewed as inappropriate or in violation of copyright, I will retract the image and withdraw it from the competition. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I have always been a purist when it comes to modelling, so the entire scene was modelled by hand (though I did use a pen and paper to sketch a few of objects). The keyboard was made as a union of 88 keys, each of which were made out of superellipsoids with a little CSG. The piano case was actually very easy to make, using boxes and CSG to define the shape and cut my last name in gold letters above the keys. The string assembly, or harp as I have been calling it, was a little tricky, and I still can't get it to be as smooth as I'd like. The shape is a cosine wave for the first half-period. The object was created using a union of 176 (88*2) cylinders, each of which has its endpoints on the curve at either side of a given point. This produces the shape nicely, but some banding still appears on the arch, depending on the light. If I could have figured out how to do this as an intersection, I would have -- but intersections do not seem to work as well in #while loops. The arches on either side are cylindrical superellipsoids, with cylinders subtracted from them. The strings are very, very thin silver cylinders. They are each surrounded by a thin halo, which has its color and turbulence assigned by an include file that is called for each string. I had originally intended to have 2-3 strings per key, but as it was, I had to use a very low threshold of antialiasing just to be able to distinguish them with one per note. My original conception of the scene included a wispy trail of color reaching from each of the sounding strings into a ethereal scene -- essentially, to give form, shape, and color to the chord being played, so that the music could be seen. Unfortunately, the filtering that took place by superimposing halos on each other to produce this effect caused a few artifacts, so I had to abandon the idea. The room is just the intersection of a few planes with a box that defines the size -- I used discrete planes so I could give each wall a different color, but I ultimately didn't need this freedom. The window is simply a subtraction from one of the planes, with a wooden frame and a thin layer of glass. I'm very pleased with the wall panelling, since each "board" is just a box with three CSG subtractions. The marble table is also just simple CSG, modelled after something I've seen, but with a couple of gold rings for decoration. The piano bench is nothing special -- most of it can't be seen from the final view -- just more boxes in CSG. The painting hanging on the back wall is a work by the late Maxfield Parrish called "The Young King of the Black Isles". I had seen this painting before, and it had caught my attention because it was also the inspiration for the cover of Enya's "The Memory of Trees". Once I realized that my idea for showing musical notes spinning into visual form was not going to work, I had some white space on the wall to use up. I couldn't think of anything particularly appropriate to put there; I didn't have the time to design a candle holder, and a mirror might show that my room has no door. It seemed only natural that a painting might be found on a study wall, so I went after this obscure yet very beautiful painting. I found that most of Maxfield Parrish's paintings were equally amazing -- and I encourage anyone with a little free time to look him up on the Web. If I had had more time, I would have made the area outside of the window more interesting. The height field that created the hills is textured using a bozo color map, though a tree or lake or something might have made it more interesting. The light across the hills is from a different direction than that lighting the room, so some shadows might appear in seemingly odd places. As it was, I had to render the image on another machine, as on my DX2/66 it would have taken about 26 days. Incidentally, although I abandoned the effect of giving form to a musical melody, I left a particular chord set up on the piano. The chord being played is actually a fairly pleasant one -- I doubt I have the key signature correct, but here are the keys: D# A# D# G A# G A# F + D# + D The middle C key is not played, I just dropped that there for reference. A ten note chord is a bit much to be played at once, I know -- the highest three notes sound in succession, descending, as the lower five notes progress up. I'll send full image source to the first person who guesses what piece I got the chord from :)