TITLE: "Cram Chowder"
NAME: Chris Hernandez
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: chrish@australia.net.au
WEBPAGE: none (yet...)
TOPIC: Maths and Physics
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cbhcram.jpg
ZIPFILE: cbhcram.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop 3

RENDER TIME: 
    28 hours 29 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    486DX2-80 (12MB RAM) left over from the caveman era.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It's late afternoon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the air
is buzzing with life...

And I'm inside cramming for a physics exam.

It's sad, but after 3 years of a physics degree, this is what springs to
mind from the phrase "maths and physics". Reams and reams of
notes, book after book stuffed full of formulae <sigh>. There's nothing
like a university course to take the beauty and fun out of something.

On the table are my trusty sidekicks - the Casio fx-100D calculator I've
had since high school, and my pen of choice, the Pilot BPS retractable.
Also, to keep me awake, there's black coffee in a University of New
South Wales mug (yep, that's where I go).

Notice the 2 textbooks - "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" and 
"Fundamentals of Physics". These are real books, and I got to know
them pretty well after 3 years.  Also in the background is "Chaos" by
James Gleick. It's a wonderful book, and was what inspired me to go
into physics in the first place.

For those with a keen eye, the notes on the pad of paper involve "radial
probability density" from quantum physics.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All objects in this scene were modelled by hand.  (Modellers?
Modellers? We don't need no stinkin' modellers...). Almost all of the
objects are quite highly detailed and can be used as foreground
elements.

The lamp, calculator and pen in the foreground are all complex CSG
objects, which I first broke down into primitives by scribbling on
little bits of paper. (I got some really weird looks at work while I was
staring intensely at this pen with a puzzled look on my face).

All image maps (books, the post it notes, the calculator, the clock and
the writing on the pad of paper) were created by hand in Photoshop. The
calculator was by far the trickiest thing to model - full of little tricky
bits which had to line up.

The textures for the wood on the desk and the wallpaper are from the
Axem texture archive, http://axem2.simplenet.com/. The desk actually
has the image applied as both an image map and a bump map.

The trees in the backround are actually just a 2D gif file image_mapped
onto a plane. I first found pictures of individual trees (also at Axem)
and pasted them together in Photoshop to form the treeline.

The famous Einstein picture is from an Einstein photo archive, which
is at http://www.th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~jr/physpiceinstein.html.

The University of NSW logo on the mug is from the UNSW website
at http://www.unsw.edu.au.

These gif files were left out of the zip files because of space reasons.
I'm more than happy to e-mail them to anyone who wants a copy.



