TITLE: Unplugged
NAME: Thomas Pimmel
COUNTRY: Belgium
EMAIL: tom@ringard.org
WEBPAGE: http://tom.ringard.org
TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: kpovmodeler 1.1 (modeler tool on linux-kde), Jpatch 0.2.1, povtree 1.4, EcoPaint2 (logo, jpg conversion and some textures)
RENDER TIME: about 7 hours
HARDWARE USED: P3 600 mhz, ram 896 Mb
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
All great inventions finish, sooner or later, into a garbage. Except one, Electricity. So, when people of rats fund a plug, they where very annoyed. What can we do with such a "strange thing"?

But Norbert, a crazy rat escaped from a laboratory, had an idea. Early in the morning, he invited all his friends to a conference to present this ultimate invention :  the "hole maker" , very useful to dig the ground for (quite illegal) seeds and cultures.

This image is a criticism of consumer society and an hommage to recycling.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Before the end of last round, I started to learn jpatch, to create more organic objects. For this round, with jpatch, I imagined a people of rats into a garbage, inspired by a comic book, Pacush Blues (PtiLuc).

This image was a big laboratory to make all thinks I was not able to do last  round : rusty cans, dirty textures, dark cloudy sky, natural light, advanced modelling.

Rats, playmobil body, cup, food cans and bottle have been released under jpatch. Grass was made with Gilles Tran Grass macro. Tree is a simple linden tree, generated by povtree.

All other objets are CSG objects, created with kpovmodeler.

The boat in the cup was home made for another canceled project, and it was funny to use it on this scene.

Light : I imagined a strange atmosphere in the morning, when rain is coming and when there is just a small square of blue sky who enlight the scene. There is  two lights, a shadowless light for objects near the camera and a main distant  arealight to make some shadows. I also used radiosity to complete the atmosphere.

The Sky : two layers of clouds, a large sphere and a sky sphere, who are textured whith bump and pigment map.

All textures were home made (hand-drawing or scanned), except sdram circuit and chair tissu (http://www.grsites.com/textures/).

About sources : I was not able to put into archive the png textures, large include files (one rat weight 3 Mb), etc... so I just zipped the main kpomodeler scene and povray export. Full scene is available on my site (http://tom.ringard.org/unplugged.tar.gz, 10 Mb). A larger file is also available : http://tom.ringard.org/images/unplugbig.jpg (3000 x 2000).

The final image is just converted to jpeg "as it was rendered", without gamma, contrast nor brightness corrections. No rats were injured during this round.

Thanks one more time to all friends for criticisms and moral support. Particular thanks to Pascale, to have supported a husband stuck on his screen too often.