TITLE: cell
NAME: Scot Shaw
EMAIL: sshaw@fas.harvard.edu
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: cell.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    49 hours, 25 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Compaq XP-1000 (Digital Alpha EV6, 500 MHz), 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A single room, evolving from an office high in a skyscraper to a cell
occupied by a single electric chair.  The image shows contrasts in
colors, lighting, and objects, all in the service of a thematic
contrast.  It could be taken as success and failure, wealth and
poverty, or many other terms; whatever words you put to it, the
contrast is between two ends of the social and political spectrum.

The aspect ratio of the image is odd for this competition, but this
was a case of form following function.  Given the idea that I wanted
to convey, this shape was necessary.  I limited the size of the image
to fit on a 1024x768 display.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The electric chair is modeled after a picture that I found on the
internet of a (at the time that the page was written) new electric
chair purchased in Florida.  The other objects in the room are fairly
commonplace.  The office chair cushions are blob objects.  The poster
on the wall uses an actual image of one of those "Successories"
posters.  The skyline outside of the window is an appropriately sized
and oriented picture of Chicago.

The brick wall is made up of individual brick objects, and I wrote a
little macro to accomplish the "fading out" of the brick wall in
back.  The floor uses a more conventional texture gradient.

I think that the long rendering time is explained by several things.
The layered texturing in places like the wallpaper took a while to
render.  The lighting also made the rendering take a while, and
involved an interesting trick.  I wanted the left side of the room,
the office, to be in a warm, yellow light and the right side to be in
a cold, blue light.  Both sides are illuminated by area lights, but I
had to keep the light from mixing.  Down the center of the image there
is a plane, opaque in the center and fading to transparency near the
back wall and floor.  This blocks the light at the center of the room,
but allows some mixing near the edges so that there isn't a hard line
at the center of the image.  This plane is oriented to that the camera
cannot see it.


