TITLE: Alone In The City 
NAME: Bob Franke 
COUNTRY: USA 
EMAIL: bfranke2@attbi.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/bob_franke/pov/pov.htm 
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. 
JPGFILE: aloncity.jpg
ZIPFILE: aloncity.zip 
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows 95/98/NT 
TOOLS USED: POV editor, PoseRay, Wcvt2pov, Poser, 
Paint Shop Pro for JPEG conversion and copyright note

RENDER TIME: 7 hrs. 15 min. for final image, 7 hrs. for the city image. 
HARDWARE USED: generic Pentium-III 450 w/ 256 MB RAM 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
The image shows an elderly man alone in his small 
apartment.  The table in the corner is pretty much the 
center of his world.  Here is sits by day and watches 
the street and by night, the television.  He pays his 
bills here and keeps track of his medication.  
Sometimes he just sits and recalls the 51 years with 
his now departed wife.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
The man is a Poser object using some of the included 
clothing items and converted for POV with PoseRay.  
The wheel chair and wall heater are objects from the 
3D Cafe and converted to POV include files with 
Wcvt2pov.  The beer bottles and lamp are lathe 
objects.  I used Chris Colefax's City Generator for 
the buildings and street seen through the windows.  
The raindrops are a height field, created with Paint 
Shop Pro.  Prisms and boxes were used for the window 
frames.

Now, here is where I depart from my usual methods.  I 
have used several image maps for textures.  I just 
couldn't resist using my new digital camera.  The 
tabletop is a superellipsoid with an image and bump 
map from a photo of table in my house.  The texture 
for the lampshade is a freebie image I found on the 
Internet.  The TV remote control is a superellipsoid 
with a photo I took of one of the many controls in my 
house.  I was going to put real buttons on it, but it 
really would have made little if any improvement in 
the final image. The envelopes are superellipsoids 
with as couple of photos of real envelopes.  The 
labels on the pill bottles are examples from some 
software for printing prescription labels.  The image 
in the picture frame is a photo, of a photo of my 
mother.  The labels for the beer bottles were found on 
the Internet.  The television is a superellipsoid with 
two photos of a real TV, one for the picture and one 
for the area around the picture.  Inside there is a 
spotlight using the "projected_through" modifier.

I wanted to use focal blur to put the city lights out 
of focus, but it looked like it was going to take 
three or four days to trace the final image.  To 
increase the speed, I traced the part with the city, 
with everything else commented out, using focal blur.  
This only took about seven hours.  Then I put this 
image on a thin box just outside the windows.  In the 
final ray trace I still had to include the city 
objects so the refractions in the raindrops would work 
correctly near the top of the windows.

Too save space the poser object, wheel chair, wall heater
and the larger image maps are not included in the zip file.

Well that's about it.
Good luck to all