TITLE: Ode to Hitchcock's "Vertigo"
NAME: Mike Haynes
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mhaynes@royell.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.royell.net/~mhaynes/
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: vertigo.jpg
ZIPFILE: vertigo.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Paintshop Pro 6.0, Poser 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    13 minutes, 48 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 450 MHz 384 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

An ode to Hitchcock's "Vertigo". This scene is intended to depict Scottie's
intense fear of heights that was so greatly challenged in the bell tower.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The biggest challenge was the creation of the staircase. I first decided that
both the X component and Y component for each section of the stairs would be 12
units. Then I chose an upward 45 degree angle and used the hypoteneus to
determine the actual length. I based the rest of the construction of the scene
on the size of the stair sections and a width of 5. In fact, the size of the
entire scene can be changed just by changing the X and Y components of the
stair sections alone.

I wanted to cast the shadow of a falling figure and used Poser to create a quick
model for just that purpose. Instead of importing the model however, I just
used a GIF of the rendered Poser model as an image map with a transparent
background to cast the shadow. It would have seemed rather silly to make the
renderer go through all the work of parsing a 3D mesh just to cast a shadow of
it.

All the other textures in the scene are from the POVRay Include Files. Paintshop
Pro was used to convert the image map to GIF format and to convert the final
render to JPEG, add my name, and resize the image.