EMAIL: msfl.bf@fasonet.bf NAME: Gerard Schockmel TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Dreamfactory COUNTRY: Burkina Faso (residence), Luxembourg (citizenship) WEBPAGE: none RENDERER USED: POV for Windows 3.02 TOOLS USED: Spatch, L-parser, PaintShop Pro 4.1, amphetamins (just kiddin') RENDER TIME: 5h34m HARDWARE USED: Notebook P120, 24 MegRAM, Win95b IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When thinking about Arts & Entertainment, the first thing that pops up in my mind is Hollywood. Mostly in its glory days, but even as it is today. What really fascinates me about Hollywood is its ability to produce stars, immortal and world-wide. Marylin Monroe, James Dean, Humphrey Bogard, etc, etc. Hollywood puts them in a virtual world, and tries to makes us believe it's reality. And succeeds... For my scene, I tried to put sham and reality side by side. As a background, I chose the good ole western movie, set before an everlasting setting sun. The right side of the image shows the slide in the projector, the left side the film stage. Real to reel... Don't look too close, or Hollywood will never be the same to you... Many thanks to PortalKeeper, who keeps supplying me with the original ideas of many of my scenes, including this one. Visit him at : http://www.thelostportal.com DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Now, let's see. I don't want to bore you with the very obvious stuff. . The scene was build without modeler. . The sky : As I wanted to have a setting sun (I'm a poor lonesome cowboy, and a long, long way from home...), I used halos for the gradient background, the sun and the clouds. And learned, thanx to the IRTC mailing list, that lots of halos means lots of max_trace_level, lots of samples, and therefore lots of patience. But I'm rambling... . For this scene, I learned to use the #while loop a lot. All buildings and footwalks are built either from single planks, or bricks. In the loops, I added random rotate and translate in each texture to avoid repetition in the grain. I didn't realize that wood textures are pretty tough to work with, as it was my first time to use them extensively. Thanks go to Steffen Heinicke and his excellent tutorial on wood in the german Webzine D.P.M. II (ftp://ftp.liteline.de/pub/dpm/dpm2_mag.zip). Cheers also to the editor of the 'zine, Joachim Thewes. Keep up the good work! . The barrel : made a curved plank in SPatch, then orbited them around the origin. . The tree : made with L-parser (slightly modified TREE007). The noose was made using a cubic_splined prism. As it is far away, one doesn't see that it isn't round. . The film-thingy is just a difference of a box and a superquadratic ellipsoid, moved in front of the camera. The camera in the reflection is the same as the one in the picture. . My signature (G.S.) is a difference{} in the ground, supposedly written with a stick in the sand. Made out of tori, cylinders, cones, and spheres. . The Saloon door is made out of prisms and lathe, the rail on the 2nd floor, as well as the saloon sign, are prisms. . Ground and mountains are height_fields. . All the rest are CSG objects (houses, camera, gun, etc) Best luck to my fellow competitionners, and to myself, of course ;)