TITLE: Four Worlds

NAME: Greg Gargett
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: ggargett@attbi.com
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: irtcwww.jpg
ZIPFILE: irtcwww.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g


TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3a, Spline Tree, BlobMan People


RENDER TIME: 
    3 days?


HARDWARE USED: 
    Gateway P850 XL, Dell GX110


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    I wanted to get away from a "realistic" rendering this time
and go more abstract with the topic but the killer concept never popped into my
head so I did this rather lame interpretation involving an apartment building. 
The four windows give a glimpse into the four different worlds contained within
the building.  Someone call the fire department!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The building is just a bunch if
cubes with three different bricky textures applied.  One row was created and
that copied to build up the walls.  All this was GSC unioned together to create
walls that I then cut door/window holes by a GSC difference.  Column caps are
rotation sweeps.

Started working on lighting next.  We have one area light off the upper-right
acting as a streetlight.  A spotlight off to the left dimly illuminates the
lower-left corner of the building.  Since all textures have an ambient of 0 I
added a light blue "filler" pointlight far off the front of the building to
fill in the shadows.  Fiddled around with light intensity and falloff to get
the look I wanted.

Did the crown molding, entryway, steps, walkway and sashes next.  All
primitives.  Lots of superquads.  Powerlines added by using bezier tubes for
wire.

Coded up some trees and bushes using Andrew Clinton's Splinetree macro.  Put
these into an .inc file that I added to Moray's include file list for the
scene.  Grass was created using an image dotted with white, gray and light gray
dots as a heightfield.  Used the leaf images provided with Splinetree to create
leaf objects that I sprinkled around.  Added fencing.  Added a backdrop picture
so something reflects off the windows.

Created the interior walls next.  Now I had to populate the place...

"Lover's" room: Just a red light shining behind an imagemap of an embracing
couple casting a shadow on some bezier patch curtains.

"Alien" room:  Aliens are bezier patches and cylinder limbs covered with a bumpy
gray texture.

"Fire" room: Flames are just a trans sweep.  Not great looking but I was running
out of time.  Added smoke using an absorption media texture inside a cube
filing the room.

"Suicide" room: Used Peter Houston's BlobMan People macro to create the human. 
This .inc file was added to the include file list for the scene.  Added some
furniture elements and a blue area light to simulate TV glow.

Since this dog was taking so long to render and time was running out I had to
split rendering between my home PC and my office PC.  I thought I had duplicate
rendering options set but the anti-aliasing looks different between the top
half and the bottom half.  Not really noticable, though.  Once the first
renders were complete and stitched together I did some tweeking but just
rerendered the affected area and pasted the patch on to the main image.

That's it.    

