TITLE: The Devils
NAME: Maurizio Tomasi
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mtdevil2.jpg
ZIPFILE: mtdevil2.zip
RENDERER USED: 


    POVRay 3.5 for Windows



TOOLS USED: 


- Paint Shop Pro 8.0 (creation of height fields and image maps, JPEG
  conversion, title)

- Poser 4

- PoseRay 3.0.1.271

- sPatch 1.5

- SplinEditor 1.2 (http://www.flashnet.it/users/fn027571/spil/index.html)

- UVMapper 0.25e



RENDER TIME: 


Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  55.0 seconds (55 seconds)
Time For Trace:    2 hours 47 minutes  42.0 seconds (10040 seconds)
    Total Time:    2 hours 48 minutes  15.0 seconds (10095 seconds)

    

HARDWARE USED: 


        AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM.



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


   This image was inspired by the novel "The Devils" (published in
1871) by Fedor Michailovic Dostoyevsky (1821-1881).  The story takes
place in a small russian town, where old local notables lead a
decadent and superficial life, propagandizing materialistic ideas and
ironizing about moral and religion.  Suddenly, a number of young men
appears, coming back to the town after having wandered through Europe
and America and bringing new political theories and religious ideas
(the "devils").  These ideas sound new, smart and high-minded to the
majority of the citizens, which begin to follow these people in their
thoughts and actions.  However, in the development of the novel these
ideas are pushed to their extreme extent and cause a burst of
terrorist acts: at the end of the novel the town is devastated by
murders, lynchings and fires.

   "The Devils" is one of my best beloved books.  It shows that decay
does not necessarly lead to a quiet and slow death (in a moral sense),
but even to violent destruction.  This final fate is almost
unforeseeable in its preliminary statements, since it can be caused
even by high humanitarian ideas, if they are not based on christian
pity and charity.  This can be read as a warning of Dostoevsky about
Russia's fate in the XX century (in the second half of the XIX century
many terrorist attacks were committed in Europe by anarchists and
radical socialists).  But the value of this book does not lies within
its historical context only.

   In fact, apart from having deep links with the present day too,
"The Devils" is a great study about the Evil: the novel is full of
characters which represent its many faces.  For my image I chose to
portray Stepan Verchovensky, which is the character most closely
related to the theme of "decay".  He is a literate and the father of
Piotr Stepanovic, one of the most treacherous and demoniacal
characters in the novel, constantly longing to determine "the
breakdown of abstract structures" like society.  The book suggests
that the son was let free to join his radical ideas because of his
excessive freedom in his younger years, since his father never cared
about him nor his education.  In fact, Stepan is an egocentric man
which does not care about anybody but himself.  He and the other
parents in the novel have a great responsibility for the horror
described in the last part of the story.  By letting the old moral and
religious values decay they unintentionally prepared the road to the
political extremism of the opportunistic and cynical younger
generation.

   To better describe Stepan Verchovensky's contradictory character, I
have chosen a list of quotes from the book (my translation from the
italian text).

        "He declared his complete agreement with the uselessness of
        the word `fatherland', he applauded the theories about the bad
        influence of religion, but he declared loudly that Puskin was
        more important than a pair of shoes, a lot more important."
        (Part I, Chapter I, Section V)

        "About his son, Stepan Trofimovic  Verchovensky  met him two
        times in his whole life.  The first time was when he was born,
        the second in Petersburg, when the young boy was going to
        enter the University." (Part I, Chapter I, Section VI)

         After the first riots, Stepan is suspected to have inspired
        them and a police perquisition in his house is ordered.
        Although nothing was found there, Stepan is very frightened. 
        "And suddenly he started crying warm tears.  A flood of tears.
        He covered his eyes with his red foulard and sobbed, sobbed
        feverishly for five minutes.  I was astonished.  This man,
        which gave us propecies for twenty years, which was our
        preacher, our patriarch  ... , this man suddenly sobbed,
        sobbed like a kid which has done a trick and is waiting the
        teacher with the stick to punish him.  ...   That absolute
        ignorance of everyday life was both pathetic and disgusting."
        (Part II, Chapter IX)

        "`And I do declare', cried Stepan Trofimovic  Verchovensky ,
        in the last step of exhaltation, `I do declare that
        Shakespeare and Raffaello are far higher than the freedom of
        servants, higher than the principle of nationality, higher
        than socialism, higher than the young generation, higher than
        chemistry, almost higher than the whole mankind, since they
        are the fruit, the real fruit of mankind, and perhaps the
        highest fruit that can exist!'" (Part III, Chapter I, Section
        IV)

   This character seems to be a simple-minded good old man, but after
having read the whole novel it is impossible to avoid thinking that
the horror described in the second half of the novel is partly due to
his inability to "live", i.e. to act in the right way.  I tried to
portray this ambivalence in my image, which shows Stepan Verchovensky
in his studyroom.

To a first sight, the scene seems paceful and quiet, and almost
nothing recalls a sense of "decay".  But note that Stepan is so
concentrated on his literary works that he turns his back to the
observer and does not welcome him: he is not happy when somebody is
visiting him (except when they praise him).  The only things that can
make him feel spiritually pleased are some beautiful works of art:
this is the reason of the presence in his studyroom of paintings,
statues, a decorated harpsichord and so on.  And, meanwhile, through
the dark passage the devils are already entering the room...

   The image uses many whitish shades, but white is not used here as a
symbol of purity: it is instead the color one would found in a
sepulchre, the "turris eburnea" where Stepan seems to be buried from
the very first page of the book.  A number of objects are implicit
references to death: the clocks and the statue with the hourglass
(they witness the passing of time), the dead butterflies in the theca,
an old-fashoned harpsichord with two keyboards (in the XIX century
these musical instruments were considered to be antiques with no
musical use: this explains the lack of music scores and a chair in
front of it).


DEDICATION

Questa immagine e` dedicata ad Angelo.  Complimenti per la laurea, ed
i migliori auguri possibili per la tua nuova, grande e bellissima
avventura da un amico su cui potrai sempre contare!

Maurizio



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 



* Light

In order not to increase the rendering time too much, I decided to use
no radiosity.  It was a bit difficult to choose the right light source
settings, but finally I found an optimal configuration:

  - One light placed to the right (main light);
  - One shadowless fill light to the left;
  - One shadowless light placed near the observer.

Every light is an area light which follows a power law, using
carefully chosen values for the "fade_distance" and the "fade_power"
parameter (actually, the first and the third light use the standard
inverse square law, while the second one uses a fourth power law).


* Floor

A box repeated many times with six textures which are randomly chosen
for each tile.  The pattern is created using the same Scheme program
("parquet.scm") used in my previous image, "The Turn of the Screw"
(May-June 2003 IRTC round), but with some little changes (the most
notable is that now the pattern is rotated by 45 degrees and a new
clipping algorithm is therefore used).  This new version of
"parquet.scm" is included in the ZIP file.  Note that now it requires
PLT Scheme instead of Guile.


* Walls

The image is one of the standard backgrounds included in the GNOME
Desktop Environment 1.4.


* Writing desk and chair

Basic shapes, CSG and lathe objects (desk legs).  The latter were
created using SplinEditor, a nice program by Alessandro Falappa.


* Inlays

All the inlays are monochrome images used in a material_map, with two
procedural wood textures (see file "chair.inc" for an example).


* Stepan Verchovensky

A simple Poser 4.0 model.  I tried to follow Dostoevsky's description
of Stepan: "the dress was elegant and characteristic: a black overcoat
with long tails  ...  and hair reaching his shoulders.  He was brown,
and only recently his hair began to get gray." (Part I, Chapter I,
Section IV)

Hairs use a freeware texture found on www.renderosity.com; to apply
this texture, I had to do an UV remap using UVmapper, since the
Poser model has ugly distortions in the uv-mapping above the neck.


* Hourglass Statue, book-ends

Poser models.  The hourglass was created with sPatch and imported in
Poser as a DXF object (using the dxflayer export plug-in).


* Harpsichord

Made with basic objects (boxes, cylinders and a cubic_splined prism 
for the curved sidebelt).  The landscape on the cover is taken from the
photo of a XVII-century harpsichord rebuilt in the late XIX century
(now kept in the Metropolitan Museum of New York).


* Clocks

Hands are rotated according to the functions defined in
"clock-func.inc".  Time of day is specified once in "mtdevil1.pov"
(see the declaration of CurrentTime) and used for each clock
definition.

The pendulum clock is made by basic shapes (boxes, sphere sweeps and
prisms) and height fields (bottom decoration and the pendulum, which
is barely visible).

The clock on the writing desk is taken from my "Sewing Machine"
(Jan-Feb 2003 IRTC round), using a different texture and the clock
functions mentioned above.


* Door

The panels are obtained by differencing the main body (a rounded box)
with six pyramid bases.  These have a greenish shade which is the same
as the skirting-board.

Note that the door is slightly shorter than it should be: with the
"right" size it would seem too much long (a perspective effect caused
by the direction of view, which is not perpendicular to the facing
wall).  Please do not blame me!  I have heard that Leonardo did similar
corrections in his paintings.


* Paintings

The two paintings on the left are two early works ("Conversation",
1870s, and "The Letter", 1873) by Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), an
italian painter which studied in Paris.  I think Stepan Verchovensky
would have liked the vacuity of these works.  Above the harpsichord
there is the portrait of an unknown lady I took from a book about
antique dealing.

Every frame is an height field.  The starting points are hand-made
images which were scanned at a very high resolution and modified in
Paint Shop Pro (*heavily* modified!)


* Chest of drawers

(It is placed in the dark room: you can see its silhouette) This was
taken almost literally from my image "The Turn of the Screw" (May-
June 2003 IRTC round).


Maurizio Tomasi
October 2003.

