EMAIL: aitzolmuelas@gmail.com
NAME: Aitzol Muelas Cortabarria
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: E-Absence
COUNTRY: Spain
WEBPAGE: aitzolmuelas.blogspot.com
RENDERER USED: povray 3.6
TOOLS USED: gimp 2.2, Microsoft Word
RENDER TIME: 52h 24min
HARDWARE USED: pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The first idea was to have a book with no text, but i found it too simple. So I bumped into this short novel, "Gadsby", written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939, if I am not mistaken, which is over 50 thousand words long and does not use a single letter E in the whole text: thus the title E-Absence, the absence of the letter E. Then I added the lamp to put an interesting light source, and a magnifying glass so that at least part of the text was readable at the image's resolution, so that you can see there are no Es in it (you can check the original text online to be sure, if you want ^_^). The full novel is available for free online at http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/index.html
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Well, to start off, the pages of the book are bicubic patches (loop of 12 double pages) and the texture uses a warped pyramid function to create the rigged edges. The text is layered on top. The covers of the book are simple CSG shapes, with a crackle pigment.
The oil lamp is a cut off blob, with crackled normal to make cute caustics ^_^, although I had to turn refraction photons off in it because it caused too many ugly highligts. The silver base is made of cutaway SOR (although not too visible you can see the shadows cast by it), and the flame, which was one of the tricky bits, uses a function I defined to simulate the ignition of a flame, which takes place (max combustion, max light) at a certain distance from origin. The media has two parts (two media in the container) one for the yellowish (scaled in the y direction), one for the blueish. There was no need to add turbulence to the flame to make it look more "natural", since the distortion created by the cracled glass was enough.
And finally, the magnifyer: simple shapes, although it took a while to adjust focal length, and therefore radii of the lens, and also position and rotation so that at least part of text could be read through the lens.
The base of the magnifying glass, as well as the table, use default textures from woods.inc, with default finish, so they don't look very nice, but I didn't have too much spare time to work on it (next time maybe).