EMAIL: sporadic@core.com NAME: Geoff Wedig TOPIC: Contrast COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Summoning COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: Megapov 0.6a TOOLS USED: Poser 3, UV-Mapper, 3dWin, Moray 3.3 RENDER TIME: 1 day, 22 hours. HARDWARE USED: PIII, 800 Mghz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Seven torches burn eternally in the seven sided room. Today, something new burned, red and malevolent, casting no light but what she saw within her sight. She didn't want to do this. It shouldn't have to be done. But it did and she would, and things would never be the same again." I imagine there will be many abstract pieces in this round, so I went for the meta-contrast of doing something (semi-) realistic. I went for several levels of contrast, though, both in the conceptual (Good/Bad, Heaven/Hell), and the stylistic (Light/Dark, Shiny/Muted). Originally, I had intended to do this in Black and White, heighting the countrast, but found the image too bland that way, so added spashes of intense color, thus adding a nice B&W/Color contrast as well. There are also some other subtle contrasts based on viewer expectation. The room (as mentioned above) is seven sided, as is the symbol drawn on the ground (a septagram), rather than the more common and expected pentagram. Although the symbol glows, it casts no light. This was intentional, as it is meant to reflect the magical sight of the two characters rather than an actual physical presence. Similarly, the angel's coloring uses values greater than 1, giving her the effect of glowing relative to her surroundings, though she too casts no light. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: As with all my images, I write a lot of code to automatically generate objects for me. The back walls, for example, were made originally with an iso-surface modified mur.inc (non-pov-ers, that's a library for POV). I found this inadequate and wrote my own stone wall generator which operates much more intelligently, giving much more control (I'm planning on releasing it as a library). In fact, all background objects, with the exception of the torches were generated using isosurfaces generated by this macro. The characters were primarily done in Poser 3, including the angel's wings, which were borrowed from a posable swan figure. The demon's horns and wings, on the other hand, were generated in straight Megapov code using spherical splines and programatically derived meshes (ie, POV calculates the points on the mesh)