TITLE: Old Cinema
NAME: Piotr Plys (male)
COUNTRY: Poland
EMAIL: ptys@gammanet.com.pl
WEBPAGE: --
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: oldcine.jpg
ZIPFILE: oldcine.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0 for DOS

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 2.5 for DOS (composing the scene)
                    Photoshop 4.0 (preparing image maps)

RENDER TIME: 
    38h 06m 33s

HARDWARE USED: 
    PC Pentium 75MHz, 16MB memory

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    I wanted to create a picture of an old, second
                    class cinema in rain. The old, tired cinema lit by pale 
                    lights, is showing movies with titles which are hardly 
                    recognizable... Nobody in the ticket office, nobody inside,
                    nobody wanting to come in. The cinema that has really gone
                    with the rain...                    

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

   I downloaded Moray V2.5 from an ftp site (I don't remember which one) for 
a trial (I never expected that there were such good modellers for Povray). 
It would be very tiring generating this scene by hand. Smaller objects (like 
lamps, poster box, pavement etc.) were created as standalone modeller files 
and then merged into one scene. All the textures were generated in Moray, all
the image maps were created in Photoshop. Honestly, this was my second scene
ever created...

The neon is an image map with an alpha channel, casting no shadows -- I didn't 
know Povray very well, so it seemed to be the only way of creating a neon. The
backlight of the neon is also an image map with an alpha channel, but expanded
and blurred in Photoshop. It casts no shadow and it is so close to the wall 
that it seems to be the reflection of the neon. A funny thing is about the
man with an umbrella -- I was looking for a picture of a man in rain, but found
none, and then I came across a picture of a Korean peasant ploughing his field
with oxen -- I cut them off, bent his hands slightly, dyed his clothes, added 
an alpha channel and finally gave him an umbrella (made of Bezier patches) -
the
man is only 2D, but his umbrella is a real 3D object! The rain is a plane with
spotted texture with filtered areas; it is rotated slightly, expanded along
one axis and scaled down along the two others. The old posters were scanned
from
a film magazine. The poster "Gone with the Rain" was created in Photoshop from
a
picture of my fiancee.

The final image was converted to JPEG with Image Alchemy PS.

Btw. I'd like to know how to make an object such as neon? Let's say I have a 
     Bezier path and would like it to be rendered as it has thickness (with a 
variable radius). Is there any way to this in Povray? Is there anyone to share 
his/her knowledge with me? Where can I obtain such information?