TITLE: To Kill a Macchia-Bowl NAME: Russell Garwood and Justin Greer COUNTRY: United States of America EMAIL: tgarwood@nwlink.com WEBPAGE: http://www.nwlink.com/~tgarwood TOPIC: First Encounter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: tkamb.jpg ZIPFILE: tkamb.zip RENDERER USED: Povray version 3.1 TOOLS USED: Povray, Rhino (beta and demo), Perl, Pascal, TI-86, and Photoshop 4.0 for jpeg conversion, name insertion, and a tiny bit of brightness adjustment. RENDER TIME: 59 02. HARDWARE USED: Russell's Pentium 166 with 48 megs, Pentium 233 laptop with 48 megs, and TI-83. Justins's Cyrix 166 with 32 megs, Dual PII 400 with 256 megs, and TI-86. Final render on Russ' laptop. When are they going to implement multi-processor support in POV? IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Mr. Dale Chihuly, that nice guy who makes the annnoying glass stuff, needs to have a little encounter. The image wasn't actually originally intended for the IRTC. I don't remember why, but I was thinking about some of Dale Chihuly's work, and thinking that there's really no reason that most of it should be very difficult to make. I also remember thinking that it was kind of funny that Chihuly's works are held in such incredibly high esteem, that Chihuly is regarded as such a master of glass, and I could probably make a reasonably good likeness of one of his works without *too* much trouble. And then I remembered an article in the paper I had glanced at some time ago . . . some guy wanted to raffle off the chance to smash a Chihuly work in a local Seattle bar. The value of the work was estimated as being between $5,000 on the low end(it was, after all, a small one) and $35,000 on the high end. John Keister, a local comedian said of the event, "We are breaking a piece of art. But we're not destroying a Chihuly. We're just making a lot more little ones." And Justin and I thought, "Hey, what a cool idea for a raytrace! And we could even use it in the IRTC!" :) Too bad that was only a couple weeks ago. :( This type of Chihuly artwork is called a macchia, but this isn't a real macchia. We just made something that sorta looked like one and said "what the heck, let's use that." The article for the Smash a Chihuly contest can be found at http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?storyID=5711 and some good examples of Chihuly's work can be found at www.chihuly.com. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: With only a few weeks to do it, and no particular match of ideas as to what each other wanted in the image, and the fact that we don't live near each other, we treated this image as a test of working together on a 'trace over the internet. It's kinda cool to work like this, and now that we've done a dry run, I think we'll have more in the future. Okay, basically, start with a hack program that does a lot of math to make the 20000 poly object... Then add some more hacks into that program... Then revamp a couple parts, and re-hack it all together until most code is completely unrecognizeable. Then start putting in the rest of the hacks to make it do what you want... Tweak it some, and you get something that looks kinda like a broken macchia. Pascal used to make an object viewer for instant feedback. Everything else in the program was done with Rhino. The hammer, the stand it's sitting on, the cordons, and the clips that hold the cordons to the posts, all that was modelled with Rhino. The wood texture for the stand was something I made about a year ago for a different raytrace. I didn't have any other textures handy for the stand, nor too many good ideas for any, so I just used my old one. The carpet is an image map Justin had lying around. Incidentally, the reason the right half of the macchia is still standing straight up when the laws of gravity say it should fall down, possibly further breaking into more pieces, is that by the time we had the model good enough to use, we didn't have time to make it, you know, look realistic. :) See the gallery on the web page for some better renders of the bowl... The source code of the image is included, and I'll warn you, it's a mess. The objects and other things of this image are available, but not included, since they're kinda large. The perl source to create the bowl is not included because it's roughly on par with the obfuscated perl code contest... (Perl source available if you think you can handle it, though.) -- Email either one of us for information on anything regarding this entry. tgarwood@nwlink.com for info on most of the image, and Rhino stuff. jgreer@technologist.com for info on the bowl, perl/pascal 'tracing code, etc.