TITLE: It's d-dark...
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmddark.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmddark.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0 Macintosh 68K

TOOLS USED: 
    paper & pencil, tape measure, DeskDraw, Adobe Photoshop.

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours 23 minutes 25.0 seconds (12205 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Macintosh Centris 650

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A teddy bear lights another candle to ward off ghosts.  The stubs of
burnt-out candles show that this is at least the third; has he got enough
candles to get through the night?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I came up with several ideas, some of which were impractical, and others
which didn't look as good when I started putting them together as they
did in my imagination.  This one appealed to me the most, which always
helps.

The ghost was sketched out, built with blobs and given a transparent
texture with an ambient higher than 1.  (I made a "desperation entry"
just showing the ghost, with no other objects, and no light sources at
all - the ghost still came out well.)  It looks like the sketch, I'm
happy with it.  (But it looks smaller and closer than it is - if it
cast a shadow, you'd get a better idea of where it is, but it'd look
less like a ghost.)

I found a nice illustration of a candle with dripping wax, and tried to
recreate it using blobs.  This just never worked out, for some reason,
and I ended up deciding that the candle had just been lit, so didn't
have any dripping wax.  I reused the candle from my entry in the Magic
round.  The unlit candles behind the bear are from a copy of the include
file, with the flame deleted - I haven't included that in the zip file.
I put wicks on them, but either they're so small they didn't render, or
I got confused and put the candles the wrong way round.  The two candle
stubs do have wax drips down the side, but you can't see that because
there's almost no light falling on them.

The matchbox and match were straightforward.  The floor and wall were
simply given dark colours and no texturing, to avoid detracting from
the subject.

The new teddy bear model still doesn't look right (I've been trying
to work that bear out since November!) so I reused the bear I made a
year ago, just modifying its size, expression and texture.  The
expression looked more nervous at the smaller sizes of my test renders.

I should probably have changed the flame into an area light, but it
occurred to me too late.  And the shadow at upper right seems to be the
shadow of the bear's right ear, not something off-camera.

Photoshop was used to add the text and convert to JPEG.

