TITLE: Show Time
NAME: Bob Franke
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
TOPIC: Arts & Enterainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: showtime.jpg
ZIPFILE: showtime.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray 3.02, Poser 2, Fractint, Keith Rule's Wcvt2pov, Paul Dawson's
ptd_tree include file and PhotoStyler for the copyright note.

RENDER TIME: 
    9 hours 11 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-133 w/ 48 Mb ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This scene shows the opening night of the first
Ray Tracing Animation Festival.  The box office
has just opened.  Because Ray Tracing is unknown
to the general public, the crowd is not
overwhelming.  Opening night reviews will no doubt
awaken the public to the great talent of the
artists and both ticket booths will be used the
next night.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

For the most part, simple constructive solid
geometry was used.  The front of the first floor
is composed of many individual stone blocks, made
with the superellipsoid object.  A Fractint plasma
cloud was used to make the height field for the
texture.The vases, inbreeded in the second level,
are lathe objects.  The data points for the
profile are based on a picture of an antique vase
I found on the Internet.

The search light is based on a picture of old
World War II light that is for rent on the
Internet.  This is an include file with two light
sources, one dim light to illuminate the inside
surface and a cylindrical light source for the
beam.

The car object is the family sedan from the 3D
Cafe, at http://www.3dcafe.com.  This was a 3D
Studio file that I used Keith Rule's Wcvt2pov to
convert to POV.  I setup the car include file so
the body color can be changed.  The car windows
use a glass texture and still trace black with the
max_trace_level set at 30.  In a daylight scene
light does go through the cars, so a guess they
should show up as black in this scene.  To save
space, this file is not included with my source
code.  If anyone wants a copy please email me.
The trees were created with Paul Dawson's ptd_tree
include file.  Not much imagination here, I
slightly modified one of Paul's excellent
examples.

The street light is an include file (strlight.inc)
with two light sources near the top, one dim point
light and a spotlight pointing straight down.

The woman, in the ticket booth, was created with
Poser 2.  To reduce rendering time, all body parts
below the waist were removed.  I exported the
object from Poser 2 as a 3D Studio file and used
Wcvt2pov to convert to POV.  I found some Poser 2
hair objects on the Internet.  The hair was a dxf
file that I again used Wcvt2pov to convert.  The
hair file is gigantic.  It has about 55,000 lines
of code and almost 11,000 objects.  One third of
the objects in the scene is the HAIR! Next time I
will create my own hair with POV objects.  Once
again, to save space, the Poser object and the
hair are not included.

Another problem with Poser is that no individual
objects are defined for the eyes, eyebrows and
lips.  I added some simple objects for the eyes
and lips, but they didn't show up in the final
rendering.  Next time I going to try mapping the
Poser2 tif files for the facial features.

The sides of the cover over the sidewalk are lit
with inward pointing spotlights.  This produces an
effect that looks like translucent blue plastic
with back lighting.

The scene is lit with 63 spotlights and 26 point
lights.  I placed several street lights (many out
of view) up and down down the street and then
added the building lights.  Many of the lights are
shadowless and atmospheric effects are only used
for the search light.  This is my first try with
atmospheric effects, and I'm still not sure about
what's going on with the lighting.

The image in the wall posters is a copy of this
image with some text added using Photostyler.  So
we have an infinite "picture in a picture."

Well, I think I will stop now.  If you got this
far, thank you for your patience.
 

