TITLE: 10F95
NAME: Thomas VIAL
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: el_profesorfr@yahoo.fr
WEBPAGE: (none (yet))
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 10f95.jpg
ZIPFILE: 10f95.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 7

RENDER TIME: 
    5h 52m 53s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 2.26 GHz




IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This is my first submission to the competition, so please don't be too
demanding.
Slightly off topic, but comments are welcome!

That's a reminiscence of those days when, as students, we had the time to
decimate the population of ros_ wine
bottles. "10F95" is the price they used to cost, before we changed to euro. The
name of the wine is "Cabernet
d'Anjou"; just after we gave up drinking it it was revoked its "appellation
contr_l_e". So we're a bit afraid
that we let down gallons of antifreezing fluid (or worse).

Whatever... this scene is pure fiction: we would not let a bottle on its own
amid corpses of fellows. You can
see it quivering with anguish, awaiting its fate!






DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All by hand with PoV's editor.
The zip file contains everything; only the front side of the label
(frontstick.png) was sampled down as the
original file is more than 1 MB compressed.


- BOTTLES
See the include file that comes along. The overall shape of the bottle was
designed by hand with a lathe object
(nothing impressive, I had plenty of models!!). Making realistic objects was
another story. It's a bit of thinking
and A LOT of trial and error -- that's why the source file is poorly commented.
I'm sure there are more elegant
elegant ways to achieve the same, but I would not sit down and do it all over
again.
If you look at the shadow of the main bottle, you'll notice that the purple
inner side is far too thin. I've tried
making it realistically large, but it doesn't look good on the object itself
(you don't see the clear "layer").
The labels are scans of a real one (again, no lack of source material).
The "chiseling" above the labels can be found on real bottles, too. I used PSP
to draw it, then with a touch
of blurring it made a perfect normal map.

- GLASS
A difference between two quartics (the equivalent of quadric paraboloids; the
higher degree makes the section
closer to a square).

- TABLE
The wood texture is a... marble pigment. I'm very happy with this one, it looks
fairly real.
A couple of layers on top of the marble desaturate/intensify some areas, and
another one yields sparse dark spots
(ash, dust, whatever).

- BACKGROUND
A couple of remote shapes. Having a plain background would spoil it all, and
since I wanted to go with focal
blur anyway, thought a (very) coarse modeling could do it.

- OBJECT PLACEMENT
There is a flag that triggers the rendering of a grid on the table. I used this
to sketch the scene with Paint Shop
Pro, with the grid, the field of view, etc. It was then easy to draw objects
here and there, and then to estimate
(roughly) their location & orientation in the final scene.

- FOCAL BLUR
There's probably too much of it on the farthest bottles. But if you make it too
low, you notice too clearly how
ugly the background is. I would tend to think that if you push the background
further away it gets more blurry -
without impacting the objects on the table - but I found it very difficult to
tune. It just seemed to have no
effect so I gave up (can anybody help?).

