TITLE: Revolution
NAME: Richard Slattery
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: richard@mgkc.demon.co.uk
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: revoluti.jpg
ZIPFILE: revoluti.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MLPOV 0.82

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Hamapatch, 3DWin, Rhino, Gimp

RENDER TIME: 
    Approx 1 hour

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1800, 512MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The idea was given to me by a friend. The wheel dates back at least 55 centuries
and changed the world, yet its simplicity defies improvement. 
I wanted to show the it through several incarnations and ended up with
cartwheel, stone millwheel, wagonwheel, motorcycle wheel rims, car wheels,
various gearwheels and a potters wheel. 
I was tempted to busy the image further with a penny farthing, unicycle, wheeled
toys etc., but in the end decided that I had already used enough.

The shadow of the tyre hanging from the tree, as well as the dilapidated state
of the scene was intended to reflect the other aspect of old technology in the
modern age... that it is soon neglected. 

I'm not entirely pleased with the composition, it's hardly artistic, but I'm
tired of fiddling with it now. 

I learned a lot of new techniques so overall it was worthwhile. I first dabbled
with POVRAY many years ago and recently rediscovered it. The computers are
orders of magnitude faster yet render times seem to be about 
the same... the results however, are getting to what I hoped they would be.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image is a total mish-mash of needlessly long winded techniques and pure
laziness.

The modelling for the walls, ceiling and the wooden wheel is entirely text based
inside povray. Textures free from http://art.net/~jeremy/ made seamless, colour
adjusted in Gimp.

The Sumerian wheel poster is spline surface from Hamapatch with a Gimp rehashed
uv-mapped image of the earliest known picture of a wheel from a stone carving
in Mesopotamia.

The wagon, gearwheels, motorcycle rims, car wheels are free 3ds models converted
to (enormous byte size)povray meshes with 3DWin4. Rust textures free from
source as above, made seamless, colour adjusted in Gimp.

The stone millwheel model was made in Rhino and exported to a mesh and a simple
granite pigment and texture added.

The tree and the weed is made by the maketree macro by Gilles Tran.

One area light for the sun, another orangish area light for the lightbulb in the
garage. Media for a bit of dust and/or haze. Media and area lights changing it
from a few minutes to several hours to render. Light grouping a point light
with the media helped with that. 

Radiosity washed the scene out too much, I prefered the darker shadows. Although
there is a HDR light probe present around the scene it actually provides no
lighting, just a bit of reflection on the shiny metal rims. This is the only
reason it was rendered in MLPOV rather than POVRAY 3.5.

Final rendered image adjusted for gamma in GIMP.

The zip file only contains the main POV file so it isn't possible to use it, but
inspection might serve as some sort of warning against the terrible techniques
I used ;) The meshes add up to over 20 MB so I'll spare the bandwidth.



