TITLE: The Right Stuff
NAME: Jeremy Harris
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: secretmojo@vei.net
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rightstf.jpg
ZIPFILE: rightstf.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MacMegaPOV 1.0

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray, Art of Illusion, Poser 2.0, PhotoShop, ColorSync

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour, 30 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        These weird-looking bad boys, from left to right, are:
        Mr. Carmagnolle, Mr. Klingert, Mr. Siebe, Mr. DaVinci, and Frank. They
span a time period of dangerous underwater exploration from about 300 b.c. to
the 1800s.
        Unfortunately, one of these test divers probably won't make it back
because of a badly engineered suit. Do you know who? 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        I hand-coded most of it in POV-Ray, including helmets, hoses, bubbles,
and all of Mr. Carmagnolle. However, I had to use the EXCELLENT Art Of Illusion
program to model some of the clothes, stole and modified some body parts from
poser 2.0, and used PhotoShop to create a height field for the landscape (not
visible, but influences the media greatly)
        I wrote my own conversion program to translate obj files exported by Art
of Illusion (its POV-Ray export is broken) into mesh2 .inc files.
        The sea warbling effect was created by applying a bumpy normal to the
camera lens, and by adding an off-screen water surface that projected caustics
onto the sea floor.
        After messing around with media for what seemed like forever, I finally
stumbled upon what looked like a film grain/painterly effect (this is caused by
using method 1 with some media). Since I dug it, and the topic was "Old"
Technology, I intensified the noise with 2 off-screen spotlights, and got the
effect you see here. 
        The bubbles were done with a self-made macro (see bubbleblast.inc) that
simulates bubbles floating upwards.
        Finally, I rendered in MacMegaPOV using a low recursion for
anti-aliasing to keep the noise, and avoiding radiosity alltogether. I rendered
from MacMegaPOV not because I used any experimental features, but because
POV-Ray for the Mac (OS 9) is currently broken. So it should render with the
official version on other platforms.
        I used ColorSync to embed an sRGB profile into the JPEG for Mac users
viewing from Internet Explorer with ColorSync turned on.
        As a bonus, if you look at the source code, you'll find that Mr.
Carmagnolle is poseable, and that there are 3 more .ini files that will render 
other versions I considered for sumbission, but ultimately eliminated.