TITLE: International Raytracing Museum
NAME: Michael Raiford
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: mraiford@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: www.michaelraiford.com
TOPIC: Museum
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rtmuseum.jpg
ZIPFILE: rtmuseum.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Built-in Text Editor

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel P4-2.8GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A picture of one of the exhibits in the International Raytracing Museum, The
exhibit is titled "The history of Raytracing"

Special thanks to Gilles Tran for allowing the use of his image "The Wet Bird"

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I began by sketching a basic idea of what the scene would look like, then
decided what objects I wanted in the museum. I then modelled each object
individually. (Exceptions being the sphere and julia fractal, which were rather
trivial)

All objects began by being a bright white color, I then built a list of
materials and began work on the materials. Once all objects were textured, I
began work on the layout of the room, and began to set the objects down. 

I realise the image seems rather stark, but, this is a museum, after all, and
the focus is on the exhibits, not the museum itself. 

Some Points of Note:

The plaques read (left to right):
"Reflective Sphere Over Checkered Plane"
"Julia Fractal"
"Cornell Box"
"The Wet Bird"

The lamp is somewhat inspired by a desk lamp I have sitting on my computer desk.


The ceiling is actually painted black (not missing) and the track lighting is
visible in the ceiling (look closely)

The lighting system allows a pitch and rotate method of aiming the lights, all
lights were hand-aimed (no point-at used in the spotlights), there is actually
an articulated arm that hangs down from the lighting track. 

The image used as part of the exhibit is well known in the IRTC community
because of the controversy it stirred in for looking very much like a
photograph. 

The Cornell box is not based on anything but a rough idea of what one would look
like in real life. 

This is one of the first scenes I have created that makes extensive use of
include files, rather than having the entire scene in one file. 

The image used for The Wet Bird may be downloaded, but is not included with the
upload for space and intellectual property rights reasons.

The glow behind the letters was inspred by something I saw used on a company
logo, once. 

Depending on your monitor gamma, you may be able to notice a slight color cast
to the black parts in the scene. I did my best to attempt to simulate the
reddish cast that many black paints and plastics tend to have. 




