TITLE: Nightcap
NAME: Robert Fremin
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: d96rfr@csd.uu.se
WEBPAGE: http://www.csd.uu.se/~d96rfr/
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cap.jpg
ZIPFILE: cap.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.02 Win32

TOOLS USED: 
    No tools used in scene building. Everything written in PovRay
            internal editor. Image post-processing (conversion & added text)
            using Paint Shop Pro 5, CE-marking in Coreldraw.

RENDER TIME: 
    30h with 800x600 adaptive AA level3 mode 2, radiosity

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Someone is having a nightcap (late drink) at the bedside.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Written in PovRay for Win32. (NT4)

!!!!
When I continued the trace after povray crashed during final rendering the
bottom part of the image went brighter than the rest.
I used brightness/contrast tool to fix the flaw so a human eye wouldn't see
it, and it now looks just like the image it should be (just so that nobody
complains about strange contrast lines across the image... :) ).
I will send in a real 0% modified version later for the archive.

I hate to be late in renderings. I hope that schools out soon so I can
concentrate on delivering the images in time for a change.

---> on to the description -->

This time I had decided not to do any image for the round, because I have
fallen behind in my courses. However during the easter-holiday I could
not control myself anymore and began to make this. :)
I have tried to make this scene look photo-realistic.

By accident I discovered some bug in Povray. When I render with radiosity,
and ONLY when the machine just booted, then the light gets weird, and the
scene looks extremely different. It looks like the ambient values get
boosted at close range. This might in fact only be the effect of poor
selection of parameters, and I discovered it with default radiosity-final.
When I rerender the scene again, the effect is lost, and I think it has
something to do with cached data. The effect is connected to a slightly
wrong setting in the radiosity distance_maximum.
Remember that the distance_maximum is dependent of the distance of the
objects from the camera.
Note: It is possible to rerender again if you just restart NT, not reboot it.
This works under UNIX too, but there a rca datafile is created with the
radiosity data? and that file must be deleted if you want to rerender...

* The clock radio is a superellipsoid with several superellipsoids used
in CSG differences-holes and unions-buttons. The digits are polygons
that used in an include-file so that it's easy to change the time.
A thin plexiglass is in front of the digits.

* The lamp screen is made of many differenced cones, tilted and duplicated
along a rotation. Without the bug  see above  the screen looks "dead", but
otherwise it looks like it is partially lit-through, and the material
looks like thick cotton!
The power switch is sphere and cylinders.
The lace is spheres scaled flat and rotated random degrees.
The cable is a blob with about 150 spheres along a 3:rd degree curve.

Note that all buttons in the scene has holes around them where the are put.
That adds very much to the overall realism.
The lightsource is a pointlight that looks_like a sphere. (It looks nice
without the screen too :) )

* The glass is just a simple cylinder-cylinder difference with a torus on
top. The grooves are differenced by boxes.
The whiskey is a matching glass-like object. I added ripples so it would
look more "alive" than it looked without it, although the surface
should be flat IRL.
I had to increase max_trace_level to 10 to get the whiskey look like
anything else than some coffee substance.

* The table is boxes with imagemaps and bumpmaps of a wooden image.
I added varnish shinyness at a (moderate) level.

* The bed is a chromed torus, cylinders and a superellipsoid. I made it a bit
more detailed at first, but it it didn't show anyway in that camera angle.

* The poster is an imagemap and boxes. The imagemap is NOT included in the
source zip, because of it's size.

* The wall texture is an image + bumpmap.

A spotlight shines on the lampscreen to make the contours appear better.

This scene should be rendered _with_ the bug only! (That is why the image
took so long to render.)


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