EMAIL:          jacoons@ameritech.net
NAME:           James A. Coons
TOPIC:          Toys and Games
COPYRIGHT:      I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT

TITLE:          This Was Abbi's Room
COUNTRY:        United States
WEBPAGE:        none

FILE NAME:      ABBIROOM.POV
JPGFILE:        ABBIROOM.JPG
ZIPFILE:        ABBIROOM.ZIP

RENDERER USED:
   PovRay 3.6 for Windows

TOOLS USED:     
   ThumbsPlus 3.20-R  (Cerius)    : Global changes, Image/Color manipulation, resizing, Tiling.
   PaintBrush         (Microsoft) : Height_Fields, Image_Maps, Image manipulation, Tiling. 
   QEDIT              (Semware)   : Global source code changes, searching, etc.
   SpilinEditor       (Windows)   : Creates Prisms, SORs and Lathes.
   PovStrip           (VB/Coons)  : Creates Splines, Color Maps, Polygons, etc (written by James Coons).
   SEARCH.EXE         (QB/Coons)  : Global File Searches (written by James Coons).
   * Breeze Designer  (Windows)   : Not used in this entry.
   * Blender          (Windows)   : Not used in this entry.
   * Spatch           (Windows)   : Not used in this entry.

HARDWARE USED:  
   Intel Pentium 600 Mhz, 65M Ram, Windows 98 Operating System

DATE STARTED:   
   09/21/2004

DATE FINISHED:  
   10/31/2004

RENDER TIME:    
   Approx 35 minutes

Image Description:

   This was Abbi's room. To most people, it is nothing special, just a
   few toys - some crayons, a guitar and a board game -- but the
   Crayons were here favorites. She will always be 8 to me.

Description Of How This Image Was Created:

   Rayola Crayons
      The Crayons are based on an earlier macro which was completely
      rewritten. The Crayon Color and Text are passed into the macro.

      The Crayon Box is pigmented with Image_Maps obtained from the
      Internet, then heavily modified. I added the "POV Logo" to the
      Crayon Box next to the "Consumer Protection" Logo and added a
      UPC Symbol to the side. The top and sides of the box were
      created from scratch.

   Drawings
      The Drawings were found on the Internet, with a few changes.

   Drinking Glass
      The Drinking Glass is an object found in the PovShort contest.

   Floor
      The Floor is a grid of programmatically-placed Height_Field
      Tiles, each with a random "y" displacement for realism. The HF
      Tiles are pigmented as a group with an Image_Map.

      I developed an interesting method of creating "dirty tiles".
      Originally, I tried giving each Tile its own pigment, but the
      Parse Time went from 38 seconds to 6 minutes. Finall, I used the
      "Cells" pigment and built a pigment cube based on four rotations
      of the original image_map pigment. With proper scaling, this
      technique can be used to "pick a random rotation" of the
      image_map. Since the object being colored is a height_field, a
      "mixture" of adjacent pigments creates a random mixture of Floor
      Tiles. It produces random, non-repeating Floor Tiles. The layer
      of random "dirt, dust, hair, fibers" on the Floor is a sparse
      turbulated granite pattern with a custom Texture_Map.

   Walls
      The walls and ceiling are boxes, pigmented with wallpaper
      images. To wrap the Wallpaper around the corner of the room, I
      unioned the walls together and applied the texture at a 45
      degree angle.

      Optional Normals simulate "wrinkles", "bubbles" or "cracks" in
      the Wallpaper, which may or may not be visible in the final
      image. The Wallpaper was applied in 3-foot segments and the
      "peeling" seams between overlapping sections are visible. The
      actual "seam" is a Height_Field.

   Baseboard
      The Baseboard along the Wall is a Prism created with
      SpilinEditor and colored with an Image_Map (Cedar Wood).

*  Guitar (not used in final render)
*     The Guitar began as a public object ("Simple Acoustic Guitar")
*     created by Luis Valoyes (www.luisvaloyes.uni.cc). I
*     "disassembled" it piece-by-piece and improved the Textures on
*     each pieceI added an Image_Map "Rose" around the Sound Hole.

*  Stratego Game (not used in final render)
*     The Game Board is a box with an actual Stratego Board image
*     wrapped onto it. The individual pieces are custom objects,
*     created for this entry.

   Lighting
      Lighting is provided by Room lights and a few spotlights.

Rendering This Image:

   All image files necessary to render this image are included in the
   ZIP File, although some may have been reduced in size or quality for
   IRTC space consideration. I rendered the final image at 1024x768
   (included in the ZIP file) to obtain the best results then used
   ThumbsPlus to convert it to JPG and reduce the size, as necessary.

About This Submission:

   This is my third submission to the IRTC. Previous Entries:

      06/2004 - Epic Proportions - "The Great Wall of China" - (Placed 32nd out of 71 entries)
      09/2004 - Desert           - "Chloride, Arizona"       - (Placed 50th out of 78 entries)
      11/2004 - Toys and Games   - "This Was Abbi's Room"           - PENDING

Interpreting the Topic "Toys and Games"

   My original idea was to show a child's room with several toys that
   were opened, played with and then discarded. The child then becomes
   more interested in playing with the boxes than with the toys.

   However, I soon realized there wasn't enough time to develop enough
   toys for such a scene. So, I decided on a just the corner of a
   child's room, such as those taken by many photographers. In the
   end, I decided to concentrate only on the Crayons and drawings.

   My secondary goal on this project was to strive for realism and
   detail. Some of the specifics were:

      1. Employed a scale of "1 POV Unit = 1 inch" to the entire scene 
         to enable accurate measurements, scaling and transformations.

      2. Crayons have realistic wax, paper and label text, random
         rotation of text on label, "random" placement of Crayons. In a
         few cases, the Crayons are located near the Drawings where that
         particular color is used. Crayons were manually placed and 
         stacked in a disorganized manner.

      3. The Crayon Box is as realistic as possible, based on reference
         photos. It also contains a UPC Symbol on the side.

      4. Used real Crayon drawings and "wrinkled" the paper by using 
         custom Height_Fields. The water from the Drinking Glass has
         wrinkled the drawing beneath it.

      5. The Floor Tiles are "Dirty", irregular and non-repeating. A
         Baseboard was added for realism.

      6. The Wallpaper "Wraps around" the corner and has realistic
         "bubbles" and "seams" between sections.

*     7. Used real Guitars as models for improving the stock Guitar.

*     8. Used real Stratego Game as a model for the Board Game.

      9. Developed the scenes using many different Camera angles and
         views, much as a real photographer would, then later chose
         the best to use for the final render.

Sources

   Simple Acoustic Guitar  by Luis Valoyes
   Drinking Glass (Lathe)  Pov Short Contest
   povworld.org            Inspiration
   google.com/images       Inspiration, Image_Maps, Height_Fields
   yahoo.com/images        Inspiration, Image_Maps, Height_Fields
   irtc.org                Inspiration

* = Some Objects are not visible in the final Image.

James A. Coons

