TITLE: Revolution
NAME: Richard Slattery
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: richard@mgkc.demon.co.uk
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: MLPOV 0.82
TOOLS USED: Moray, Hamapatch, 3DWin, Rhino, Gimp
RENDER TIME: Approx 1 hour
HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 1800, 512MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The idea was given to me by a friend. The wheel dates back at least 55 centuries and changed the world, yet its simplicity defies improvement. 
I wanted to show the it through several incarnations and ended up with cartwheel, stone millwheel, wagonwheel, motorcycle wheel rims, car wheels, various gearwheels and a potters wheel. 
I was tempted to busy the image further with a penny farthing, unicycle, wheeled toys etc., but in the end decided that I had already used enough.

The shadow of the tyre hanging from the tree, as well as the dilapidated state of the scene was intended to reflect the other aspect of old technology in the modern age... that it is soon neglected. 

I'm not entirely pleased with the composition, it's hardly artistic, but I'm tired of fiddling with it now. 

I learned a lot of new techniques so overall it was worthwhile. I first dabbled with POVRAY many years ago and recently rediscovered it. The computers are orders of magnitude faster yet render times seem to be about 
the same... the results however, are getting to what I hoped they would be.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The image is a total mish-mash of needlessly long winded techniques and pure laziness.

The modelling for the walls, ceiling and the wooden wheel is entirely text based inside povray. Textures free from http://art.net/~jeremy/ made seamless, colour adjusted in Gimp.

The Sumerian wheel poster is spline surface from Hamapatch with a Gimp rehashed uv-mapped image of the earliest known picture of a wheel from a stone carving in Mesopotamia.

The wagon, gearwheels, motorcycle rims, car wheels are free 3ds models converted to (enormous byte size)povray meshes with 3DWin4. Rust textures free from source as above, made seamless, colour adjusted in Gimp.

The stone millwheel model was made in Rhino and exported to a mesh and a simple granite pigment and texture added.

The tree and the weed is made by the maketree macro by Gilles Tran.

One area light for the sun, another orangish area light for the lightbulb in the garage. Media for a bit of dust and/or haze. Media and area lights changing it from a few minutes to several hours to render. Light grouping a point light with the media helped with that. 

Radiosity washed the scene out too much, I prefered the darker shadows. Although there is a HDR light probe present around the scene it actually provides no lighting, just a bit of reflection on the shiny metal rims. This is the only reason it was rendered in MLPOV rather than POVRAY 3.5.

Final rendered image adjusted for gamma in GIMP.

The zip file only contains the main POV file so it isn't possible to use it, but inspection might serve as some sort of warning against the terrible techniques I used ;) The meshes add up to over 20 MB so I'll spare the bandwidth.