EMAIL: tom.waddell@ntlworld.com
NAME: Tom Waddell
TOPIC: Toys & Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION  COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Carrom
COUNTRY: UK
RENDERER USED: povray 3.6
TOOLS USED: PovRay 3.6, Vue d-Esprit 4, Poser 5, Gimp
RENDER TIME: 
HARDWARE USED: Imac G3 600
RENDER TIME: 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Two guys playing Carrom in a room.  Carrom is a pre-snooker/pool game where a player "flicks" their striker into their pieces to try and pot them in the corners.  In this game the player on the left is taking his shot in this fairly close game.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I spent a few days thinking about what I was going to try and create and was originally going to do a monopoly board.  Whilst looking for my monopoly board I saw my Carrom board and thought why not do that.  So I started measuring the board to get the dimensions right. I decided to learn how to use povray to do this image as Vue isn't very appropriate for doing indoor scenes.  I originally decided to do the image with a very close up shot of the players but decided to zoom out a bit so I could feature more of the room.  I also tried the scene with more than 1 game going on but went back to the original 1 game.  
All the furniture in the scene is fairly basic CSG models, the playing pieces are lathe objects and the curtains are an open isosurface.
The main board is made up of the dark wooden edging which is CSG, the base whose texture was made using the Gimp, and the corner holes and plugs which again are CSG
The players were created in poser 5 exported and then converted with poseray. One player has a simple sitting pose and the other player is taking a shot so a lot of time was spent in getting his hand to the right position so it looks like he is taking a shot with his middle finger.
The picture in the frame was created and rendered in Vue d'espirit 4 the boat was placed on the water plane with hills in the background.  Mist and fog was added and a purple filter was added to the camera.  The picture was created because the wall was looking very bare above the fireplace and I felt the scene needed a bit more detail in the background.
I wanted to create the effect of the lights in the room shining through dust in the room so added some media and photons to the room to create the columns of light coming from the window. 
I then spent time texturing all the objects to make them more realistic.
Many of the textures such as the flooring and brickwork in the fireplace were downloaded from the internet and then edited using the Gimp, a few such as the Carrom Table playing surface were created from scratch in the Gimp and most of the other textures such as the wood textures, the curtains and the glass were PovRay textures.
 
This is my first image created using PovRay and so there are probably much better ways of creating some of the objects. I have included the PovRay files and would appreciate any feedback to help improve my PovRay coding.