TITLE: Music To Trace By
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.5
TOOLS USED: PovRay, Paint Shop Pro
RENDER TIME: 8h 56m
HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 1.6 GHz, 1GB Ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
I was having trouble deciding on a subject until I opened my desk drawer and found an old cassette tape hiding there.  I thought it would be perfect as it was a technology that had come and (almost) gone during my lifetime.  After I had modelled the tape and was trying to decide where to go from there, I realized today I relax by raytracing and listening to mp3's.  Fifteen years ago, I relaxed by listening to my old tape collection while trying to draw with pencil & paper (yes, my drawings were just as bad as the one in this scene).
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Most everything is CSG with image pattern textures for the cassettes and player.  The tape inside the cassettes are sphere sweeps scaled along the y axis.  The loose tape that was pulled out of the cassette is a mesh made using a macro I wrote with a few hints from searching old posts to the povray newsgroups.  It's not perfect, but works ok here.  The spiral ring on the tablet is just a string of toruses cut in half and rotated so they form a continuous loop.  The tablet itself is just a box with a bicubic patch for the top page.  The lamp is CSG with a bright white finish on the inside of the shade.  The bulb is a flattened transparent sphere with emitting media.  The pictures in the background were a couple of my very early attempts at raytracing.  I thought they would be a good background considering the topic.  I'm not really happy with the placement of the colored pencils in the cup, but didn't have enough time to write a macro to place them properly.  The macro I used simply translates the pencils a random amount from the center of the cup, rotates them so they are spread evenly around the y axis (to avoid having one half inside another) and finally rotates the pencils so they rest against the top rim of the cup.  The long render time comes mainly from the high aa & radiosity settings I used for the final render.  As always, any comments, criticism or advice is greatly appreciated.