TITLE: To Read In Bed
NAME: Tony Ewen
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: Ewen.Tony@cabs.com.au
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: aenight.jpg
ZIPFILE: aenight.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    TrueSpace 2

TOOLS USED: 
    Image - TrueSpace, AutoCad LT, Corel PhotoPaint 5 (JPG conversion);
Additional tool for textures - Pov-Ray, Microsoft Image Composer,
Paintbrush

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 100 notebook

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A scene of a bedroom lit only by a reading lamp, all
set up for reading in bed.  I've got a book, I've got a cuppa, and, most
important of all, I've got chocolate!!!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started out with the intention of using TrueSpace as a reference
modeller, before doing the "real" image in Pov-Ray. As things progressed
I realised that the textures I had in TrueSpace we're already what I
wanted so, rather than reinvent the wheel, I changed plans somewhat. The
modelling was fairly straightforward, due to TS2's excellent modelling
interface.

The lamp is modified from one supplied as a sample with TS2, I changed
the textures and the shape of the shade to suit the style I was after.
The lights and shadows were done by modelling the fittings and putting
highly refractive bulbs in them. The shadows were all wrong without the
fittings. 

I've used imported images as textures on the door, the picture, and the
book cover.  These images were the really interesting bits to produce
(particularly the book cover).

The image map for the door I found on my hard disk and believe it
shipped with TS2.

Those with spectacularly good memories (and an IRTC obsession) may just
remember seing the picture on the wall before - it's my December 97
entry composed entirely within Pov-Ray.  This would mean that if one
included this image map in the overall rendering time, we jump from just
over 1 day to just over 4 1/2 (phew, glad it wasn't all at once).

The book cover was an interesting project, it is one of my many custom
backgrounds that I've done this year for my own use.  What it is is a
celtic weave done in 3d in a kind of mat fashion.  This is shown
floating in the air with colored visible spotlights splashing on it.  I
did the initial weaving in AutoCad LT, then tossed it into PhotoPaint
(which very conveniently reads WMF files) for coloring and conversion to
a height field, then I tossed the resulting bitmap into a custom Pov-Ray
script I've got set up for the purpose to spit out the base image.  Then
It was back to PhotoPaint for format conversion.  When I started working
on the book for this image, I grabbed the cover image and tossed it into
Image Composer to add the title (created in PaintBrush).  This was
easier than doing the title separately within TS2.  The original cover
image took about an hour to render.  Of course, the title was just made
up on the spur of the moment.

The book cover inside the bedside unit is hidden by shadow but happens
to be the same as the one on the bookmark and is based on Star Trek.
The image includes a model of the Enterprise E (being one of the few
downloaded models I have in my collection.  I did this map months ago as
yet another background image.

The parts of the picture frame are based on an extruded DXF file that I
created in AutoCad (it's 2d control is far better than TS2, IMHO).  A
little axis manipulation and some trimming and, voila - one picture
frame.

The chocolate and wrapper were originally modelled in a separate file so
as to save visual clutter while I was doing it.  That was done in the
train on the way to work.


