TITLE: Some Strings Attached
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ssa.jpg
ZIPFILE: ssa.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Poser, Poseray

RENDER TIME: 
    20 hrs 43 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1.6 GHz, 1 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I think about the future, my thoughts are inevitably drawn to the old
destiny versus freewill argument.  Is the future really the outcome of our
conscious choices or just the results of subatomic coin tosses in the
chemistries of our brains?  Are we cutting or tying the strings of fate by
learning to manipulate those coins?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The marionettes are Poser figures converted with Poseray.  The strings are
sphere sweeps.  There is a slight error with at least one of them, but I didn't
have time to correct it.

The stand for the crystal ball is a union of spheres, cylinders and toruses.

The pennies are cylinders with an image of a penny used as both image and bump
maps.  The scale is a little off, but I decided that making them smaller made
it too hard to recognize them as coins.

The bricks are isosurfaces hand placed (with a small random offset) in order to
get the window placed correctly.  I used a texture macro to randomize the base
color of the individual bricks.

The candles and computer were objects created by me for previous IRTC entries. 
The computer in the crystal ball is the reflection of a no_image object.

To make the lightning, I created a random spline to place spheres with emitting
media.  The forks were made by translating a small piece of the spline.  It
could probably be converted to a recursive macro for more complex lighting
bolts.

I didn't include the source for the marionettes due to the Poser license, but
the source for everything else is in the zip file.

As always, all comments, criticism and advice is greatly appreciated.