TITLE: The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe
NAME: Mark E. Poole
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mark_poole2000@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mep_poe.jpg
ZIPFILE: mep_poe.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.1g for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray v3.1for Windows/NT with Lens Flare and Rounded objects
Plug-ins. HP ScanJet 5p scanner. HP Paperport. Paintshop Pro. 

RENDER TIME: 
    12h 14m 59s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dell Dimension XPS - 300mhz Pentium II.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

With this work I wished to capture the essence of a small collection of the work
of Edgar Allan Poe.  They all have a surreal quality that deals with death or
the threat of death in such a way that we suspect the narrator of each is on
the brink of madness.
To experience Poe, you discover his is a cerebral sort of horror, bringing up
mental images that have a deeper impact than the visceral effect of a mere
visual image.

If you know Poe, you may wish to view my submission and spot the references
before reading further.

I have constructed a tableaux from the following stories and poems:

The Cask of Amontillado
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Masque of the Red Death
The Raven
To One in Paradise

I will explain each in turn:

The Cask of Amontillado

This is a story where the protagonist (Montresor), lures the man who has wronged
him (Fortunato), down into his extensive family crypt, which also serves as a
wine cellar.  Montressor does this by tweaking Fortunato's vanity; his supposed
ability to determine the authenticity of fine wines, hence the Cask of
Amontillado.

Montressor chains his drunken enemy up in a dank niche in the wall.  Then he
proceeds to brick him up behind a hastily laid wall of stone:
============================================
...I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth,
and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I
again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble
rays upon the figure within. 
A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of
the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back...

...there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled
with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there
came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was
succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognising as that of the
noble Fortunato. The voice said -- 
"Ha! ha! ha! -- he! he! -- a very good joke indeed -- an excellent jest. We will
have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo -- he! he! he! -- over our wine
-- he! he! he!" 
"The Amontillado!" I said. 
"He! he! he! -- he! he! he! -- yes, the Amontillado . But is it not getting
late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the
rest? Let us be gone." 
"Yes," I said "let us be gone." 
"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR!" 
"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!" ...
============================================


The Pit and the Pendulum

This story takes place during the Inquisition, and the narrator describes a
succession of horrors meant to torment him to death.  He narrowly escapes
falling into a vile pit in a dark cell, then is imprisoned on a table below a
queer clock-like mechanism moving a swinging pendulum:
===========================================
...The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a
natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly
disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed --with
what horror it is needless to say --that its nether extremity was formed of a
crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the
horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a
razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and
broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole
hissed as it swung through the air...
=============================================
He escapes by encouraging rats to clamber all over him and chew through his
bindings.  Then he finds the walls are being made red-hot and are moving in to
force him into the pit.


The Masque of the Red Death

This is a bizarre tale of a Prince Prospero who decides to lock himself and
hundreds of his closest friends behind the walls of his castle, while the
countryside outside is being decimated by a horrible plague called the "Red
Death."  At the height of the misery outside, he decides to hold a weird
masquerade ball within seven oddly constructed rooms.  The strangest was a
black room with a red stained glass window.  At the stroke of midnight (tolled
out on a really bizarre clock) a party-crasher arrives that literally scares
all the guests to death:
===========================================

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.  He had come like a
thief in the night; and one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed
halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall; and
the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay; and the
flames of the tripods expired; and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over
all.
============================================

The Raven

The most famous work of Poe, so much so that his grave marker bears the likeness
of a raven on it.  The narrator drives himself to madness trying to guess the
reason for the black beast's visit -- does this bird represent his guilt or
grief for his lost Lenore?
The last few paragraphs are represented in my image:
============================================
..."Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird of devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore--
Tell his soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
         Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
         Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor,
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
         Shall be lifted -- nevermore!
============================================




To One in Paradise

This seems to be a love sonnet, and I guess it is, but it is to a woman dead,
and the narrator appears to dwell a little too much on it.  Still the poetry is
hauntingly beautiful, and I use the last few lines as an inscription on the
crypt:
============================================
...And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams -
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.
============================================



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I am a complete novice at 3-D modeling, having stumbled across the POV-Ray
website (and thinking "this is too cool!") about a month ago.  I started
playing with Moray and fell in love with it.  I registered it after a few days.
 There is no way I could have done this image without it.

I used this contest as an attempt to learn more about modeling.  I
"brute-forced" most of this stuff, since I don't know any better, for instance;
the simulated motion blur of the pendulum was created by a couple of flattened
Torii the size of the blade and the sphere, made semi-transparent.  There
probably are better ways of doing it, I just couldn't figure it out.

I welcome any constructive criticism and especially any hints anyone would like
to offer.

I started on this contest on October 10th, 1999 and have worked on it a few
hours here and there almost every day, as time permitted.  I would set up a
rendering at full resolution every night, then do test renderings after making
modifications.  I made a separate copy before every major change, so I could go
back after a screw-up.  This is rev 28.

The main problem was how to fit all of these elements in.  After I constructed
the pendulum (two flattened spheres, a cone, a round sphere and two Torii), and
did a test render, I realized that the bronze could be used to reflect back
another side of the set.  The Raven was to play a prominent part, but in
silhouette only.

Most everything was CSG except the Raven, the screaming face and the Red Death
figure.
The Red Death costume is my first attempt at Bezier Patches.  The Skull (a
plaster Halloween leftover from Spencer's Gifts last year) and my face were
simply placed on an HP ScanJet 5p scanner.  I just hit the button and held
still, scanning the images into HP PaperPort.I then cropped the images using
Paintshop Pro.

The Raven image is a height-field from a bitmap and used to create the
silhouette.
The Poe wine label was done by scanning in a likeness of Poe and adding his name
and the dates of his birth and death. I then changed the background to a
parchment color.  I mapped it to a cylinder a fraction (like .001) bigger than
the size of the bottle itself, then cropped it with a cube and added it to the
bottle.  The mapping was a pain, I really had no idea what I was doing, and I
just had to play with it by making the background much larger than the
portrait.

All of Poe's work and his image are over a hundred and fifty years old, and are
not bound by copyright laws.  

The walls were made by creating one block, then using the great duplication
feature in Moray.
For the imprisoning wall, I created a rounded cube and "nicked" it with a
variety of shapes, then rotated each one 90 degrees 2 ways on copying it.

The wine bottle, puddle, glasses and trowel were fun to construct, but I spent a
long time getting their placement to my liking.

I used the standard texture maps that came with Moray, and tweaked or created
new ones from them.

I intentionally turned everything at bizarre angles, both to give it that crazed
look and to squeeze everything in.

I used Paintshop Pro to convert the final image from *.tga to*.jpg.  No other
post-processing was done.

I had an enormous amount of fun creating this, but I am glad that the deadline
forces it to be over.  I felt driven to madness by the minutiae of shifting
something a fraction of an inch here, twisting it a few degrees of rotation
there, adding a hint of brightness there...

Mark Poole
mark_poole2000@yahoo.com
October 31, 1999

