TITLE: To Kill a Macchia-Bowl
NAME: Russell Garwood and Justin Greer
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: tgarwood@nwlink.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.nwlink.com/~tgarwood
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tkamb.jpg
ZIPFILE: tkamb.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray version 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Rhino (beta and demo), Perl, Pascal, TI-86,
            and Photoshop 4.0 for jpeg conversion, name insertion, 
             and a tiny bit of brightness adjustment.


RENDER TIME: 
    59 02.

HARDWARE USED: 

Russell's Pentium 166 with 48 megs, Pentium 233 laptop with 48 megs, and TI-83.
Justins's Cyrix 166 with 32 megs, Dual PII 400 with 256 megs, and TI-86.
Final render on Russ' laptop. When are they going to implement multi-processor
support in POV?


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Mr. Dale Chihuly, that nice guy who makes the annnoying
glass stuff, needs to have a little encounter.

The image wasn't actually originally intended for the IRTC. I don't
remember why, but I was thinking about some of Dale Chihuly's work, and
thinking that there's really no reason that most of it should be very
difficult to make.  I also remember thinking that it was kind of funny that
Chihuly's works are held in such incredibly high esteem, that Chihuly is
regarded as such a master of glass, and I could probably make a reasonably
good likeness of one of his works without *too* much trouble.

And then I remembered an article in the paper I had glanced at some time
ago . . . some guy wanted to raffle off the chance to smash a Chihuly work in
a local Seattle bar.  The value of the work was estimated as being between
$5,000 on the low end(it was, after all, a small one) and $35,000 on the
high end.  John Keister, a local comedian said of the event, "We are
breaking a piece of art.  But we're not destroying a Chihuly.  We're just
making a lot more little ones."

And Justin and I thought, "Hey, what a cool idea for a raytrace!  And we
could even use it in the IRTC!" :)  Too bad that was only a couple weeks ago.
:(

This type of Chihuly artwork is called a macchia, but this isn't a real
macchia.  We just made something that sorta looked like one and said "what
the heck, let's use that."

The article for the Smash a Chihuly contest can be found at
http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?storyID=5711
and some good examples of Chihuly's work can be found at www.chihuly.com.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    With only a few weeks to do it,
and no particular match of ideas as to what each other wanted in the image,
and the fact that we don't live near each other, we treated this image as a
test of working together on a 'trace over the internet.  It's kinda cool to
work like this, and now that we've done a dry run, I think we'll have more
in the future.

Okay, basically, start with a hack program that does a lot of math to make
the 20000 poly object...  Then add some more hacks into that program...
Then revamp a couple parts, and re-hack it all together until most code is
completely unrecognizeable.  Then start putting in the rest of the hacks to
make it do what you want...  Tweak it some, and you get something that looks
kinda like a broken macchia.  Pascal used to make an object viewer for instant
feedback.

Everything else in the program was done with Rhino.  The hammer, the stand
it's sitting on, the cordons, and the clips that hold the cordons to the
posts, all that was modelled with Rhino.

The wood texture for the stand was something I made about a year ago for a
different raytrace.  I didn't have any other textures handy for the stand,
nor too many good ideas for any, so I just used my old one.

The carpet is an image map Justin had lying around.

Incidentally, the reason the right half of the macchia is still
standing straight up when the laws of gravity say it should fall down,
possibly further breaking into more pieces, is that by the time we had
the model good enough to use, we didn't have time to make it, you
know, look realistic. :)  See the gallery on the web page for some better
renders of the bowl...

The source code of the image is included, and I'll warn you, it's a mess.
The objects and other things of this image are available, but not included,
since they're kinda large.  The perl source to create the bowl is not
included because it's roughly on par with the obfuscated perl code contest...
(Perl source available if you think you can handle it, though.)

-- Email either one of us for information on anything regarding this entry.
tgarwood@nwlink.com for info on most of the image, and Rhino stuff.
jgreer@technologist.com for info on the bowl, perl/pascal 'tracing code, etc.

