TITLE: Unplugged
NAME: Thomas Pimmel
COUNTRY: Belgium
EMAIL: tom@ringard.org
WEBPAGE: http://tom.ringard.org
TOPIC: Great Inventions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tpunplug.jpg
ZIPFILE: tpunplug.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    kpovmodeler 1.1 (modeler tool on linux-kde), Jpatch 0.2.1, povtree
1.4, EcoPaint2 (logo, jpg conversion and some textures)

RENDER TIME: 
    about 7 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    P3 600 mhz, ram 896 Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

All great inventions finish, sooner or later, into a garbage. Except one,
Electricity. So, when people of rats fund a plug, they where very annoyed. What
can we do with such a "strange thing"?

But Norbert, a crazy rat escaped from a laboratory, had an idea. Early in the
morning, he invited all his friends to a conference to present this ultimate
invention :  the "hole maker" , very useful to dig the ground for (quite
illegal) seeds and cultures.

This image is a criticism of consumer society and an hommage to recycling.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Before the end of last round, I started to learn jpatch, to create more organic
objects. For this round, with jpatch, I imagined a people of rats into a
garbage, inspired by a comic book, Pacush Blues (PtiLuc).

This image was a big laboratory to make all thinks I was not able to do last 
round : rusty cans, dirty textures, dark cloudy sky, natural light, advanced
modelling.

Rats, playmobil body, cup, food cans and bottle have been released under jpatch.
Grass was made with Gilles Tran Grass macro. Tree is a simple linden tree,
generated by povtree.

All other objets are CSG objects, created with kpovmodeler.

The boat in the cup was home made for another canceled project, and it was funny
to use it on this scene.

Light : I imagined a strange atmosphere in the morning, when rain is coming and
when there is just a small square of blue sky who enlight the scene. There is 
two lights, a shadowless light for objects near the camera and a main distant 
arealight to make some shadows. I also used radiosity to complete the
atmosphere.

The Sky : two layers of clouds, a large sphere and a sky sphere, who are
textured whith bump and pigment map.

All textures were home made (hand-drawing or scanned), except sdram circuit and
chair tissu (http://www.grsites.com/textures/).

About sources : I was not able to put into archive the png textures, large
include files (one rat weight 3 Mb), etc... so I just zipped the main
kpomodeler scene and povray export. Full scene is available on my site
(http://tom.ringard.org/unplugged.tar.gz, 10 Mb). A larger file is also
available : http://tom.ringard.org/images/unplugbig.jpg (3000 x 2000).

The final image is just converted to jpeg "as it was rendered", without gamma,
contrast nor brightness corrections. No rats were injured during this round.

Thanks one more time to all friends for criticisms and moral support. Particular
thanks to Pascale, to have supported a husband stuck on his screen too often.

