TITLE: Music To Trace By
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cassette.jpg
ZIPFILE: cassette.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    PovRay, Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    8h 56m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1.6 GHz, 1GB Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I was having trouble deciding on a subject until I opened my desk drawer and
found an old cassette tape hiding there.  I thought it would be perfect as it
was a technology that had come and (almost) gone during my lifetime.  After I
had modelled the tape and was trying to decide where to go from there, I
realized today I relax by raytracing and listening to mp3's.  Fifteen years
ago, I relaxed by listening to my old tape collection while trying to draw with
pencil & paper (yes, my drawings were just as bad as the one in this scene).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Most everything is CSG with image pattern textures for the cassettes and player.
 The tape inside the cassettes are sphere sweeps scaled along the y axis.  The
loose tape that was pulled out of the cassette is a mesh made using a macro I
wrote with a few hints from searching old posts to the povray newsgroups.  It's
not perfect, but works ok here.  The spiral ring on the tablet is just a string
of toruses cut in half and rotated so they form a continuous loop.  The tablet
itself is just a box with a bicubic patch for the top page.  The lamp is CSG
with a bright white finish on the inside of the shade.  The bulb is a flattened
transparent sphere with emitting media.  The pictures in the background were a
couple of my very early attempts at raytracing.  I thought they would be a good
background considering the topic.  I'm not really happy with the placement of
the colored pencils in the cup, but didn't have enough time to write a macro to
place them properly.  The macro I used simply translates the pencils a random
amount from the center of the cup, rotates them so they are spread evenly
around the y axis (to avoid having one half inside another) and finally rotates
the pencils so they rest against the top rim of the cup.  The long render time
comes mainly from the high aa & radiosity settings I used for the final render.
 As always, any comments, criticism or advice is greatly appreciated.

