TITLE: Nacht Abri (aka Night Shelter)
NAME: Yomen Laye
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
EMAIL: yomenlaye@lycos.nl
WEBPAGE: http://members.lycos.nl/yomenlaye/new/digitized/art/irtc_08-2003/
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: abri.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5 for Linux

TOOLS USED: 
    10 sheets of paper, a red pencil, a gray pencil, an eraser, millions
of brain cells, Poser 5, POV-Ray 3.5 for Linux, KWrite, the GIMP, Konsole

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour, 5 minutes, and 10 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 64MB nVidia videocard, 256MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Note: There should have been more background and scenery, I know.
Note: The image is dark, boost the brightness of your monitor to see all the
details, but remember that the entire image is at it's best in the dark.

What you see is an abri (in the Netherlands it's a common word, it is actually
an abbrevation for bus shelter).
In the left corner (from your point of view) is a poster, advertizing for Yomen
Laye Underwhere.
In the right corner (from your point of view) is a bench, on that bench stands a
birdcage.
In the birdcage there is a woman.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

First: the Idea
My first idea was to do something with endless rows of balloons that where
leaving a tube. Yes, that was when I had just learned how to make loops in POV.
But about a week later I made a birdcage, just for fun. At that very moment a
particle from the Netherworlde, containing precious Inspiration, just missed my
head. Luckily, some of the Inspiration leaked out on it's flight, just enough
to give me the idea to put a person in the cage. But then? A person in a cage
is surrealistic, but what about the surrounding? To make the strangeness
greater I thought of putting the cage in an everyday surrounding. Since I have
travelled a lot by bus, an abri is a very everyday surrounding for me.

Second: the Technique
- First things first, so first I made a macro to create a glass pane with
rounded corners. I guess it could be done in an easier way, but my macro builds
a quarter of the pane first (with two boxes and a quarter of a cylinder; CSG)
and then creates a half pane by rotating x*180, and at last the whole pane by
rotating the half one by y*180 (of course it is an union of the original and
the rotated one).
- I've also written a macro to create the posts with rounded corners (four boxes
and four cylinders; CSG).
- The guy on the poster is a Poser 5 render, the text was added with the GIMP.
The poster housing is very simple CSG.
- The bench is also quite simple CSG, it is build of cylinders, tori and boxes.
The upper surfaces have a leopard normal map to simulate the little bumps that
an abri-bench has.
- The lamppost is too simple, two cylinders and a sphere.
- The tiles are simple of design, just as they are in real life. Simple loop
that lays them on the ground, adding random space between them and shifting 'em
randomly upwards to get that, you know, 'bumpy' effect. The texture is unique
for every tile (long live the loops and the random number generator).
- The birdcage is somewhat more complex. I've first made a vertical bar, then
made a while loop to create 30 in a circle. After that I've added two
horizontal bars, then the border at the bottom (CSG). At last the bottom ans
the stick to sit on. That stick has some nifty thingies to attach it to the
cage (but you can't see them, sniff)! The woman is another Poser model (Judy to
be precise), in a phone pose, with a crying expression (she even wears a
bracelet, a ring and earrings). But.... when I placed her in her cage and
rendered that scene I descovered that her hear was gone!? That arises the
question whether it is healthy for living beings to be placed in a cage, even
if it is a virtual one. It might be that my birdcage is a Cage of Faraday and
that there is an tremendous electric field in the cage, causing all the hears
on ones head to fly upwards and then fall down again. But maybe she just got
mad and teared all her hear out, who knows?

Third: the Glory
Well, actually, just a dozen people or something know that I'm working on
this... So I haven's gained any *real* Glory yet. But that will change when I
win the first prize :D.

Fourth: the Links
- My (Dutch) project homepage:
http://members.lycos.nl/yomenlaye/new/digitized/art/irtc_08-2003/
Just some renders et cetera, I haven't even had time to design a real website
for it.
- My art gallery (damn, I have to make a good one...):
http://members.lycos.nl/yomenlaye/artwork/
Click on an image title to view the image.

Fifth: the Margin
This image is dedicated to:
 All those animals who are living in cages (especially the female humans).
Thanks to the following people/organizations:
- Myself for helping me at all times
- Tarim for giving serious critics
- Nightwish (and various other artists) for their music
- Lycos for giving me a space on the web and spoiling it with
navigation-devouring ads
- The POV-Ray team for writing excellent software
- The guys who made Poser for making something excellent that doesn't work under
Linux
- All the Linux developers for showing me the Path to Tux
- All the Microsoft developers for giving me a headache (bashing your head
against a solid wall is a normal reaction to Windows)
- My parents for feeding me
- My bed for letting me sleep in it
- My chair for letting me sit on it
- And, of course, the IRTC
By the way, if you want the sourcecode or if any questions are left unanswered,
mail me: yomenlaye@lycos.nl

