TITLE: The Simplest Machine
NAME: Matthew J. Sayre
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: desert-irtc@usa.net
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mjs_tsm.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    MS Paint (to transfer .BMP to .JPG), Photoshop Essentials
(branding), MorayWin v3.5

RENDER TIME: 
    3h 11m 44s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Panasonic Toughbook CF-51, 1 GB mem, Intel Centrino, WinXP

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

At the Stickville National Museum of Art and History, there is a monument of J.
Albert Einstick, the discoverer of one of the most basic and simple machines in
existence: the lever. Here he is shown moving a nodule of cooled Volcanic Taka
rock. Later, he found that boiling water created steam, and when captured,
could create pressure that could be put to all kinds of uses. This could be
used from heating homes to the driving force behind massive public transport
systems. 

Everything that is built or founded must have a solid base or it will collapse.
Our technology today would never have been possible without the idea of the
lever.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I used MorayWin to create a scene and then used POV-Ray to render it. I read the
title "Minimalism" and the first thing that popped in my head was the concept
of the lever, the most minimal of machines. But how could I make it into a
picture? A person moving an object seemed the answer. After some thinking I
decided on a museum scene. 

I wanted to create figures in Poser and transfer them over to POV-Ray or Moray
but I've been having problems getting it to work right and since I'm deployed
to Iraq at this time, my free time is very scarce. I decided to use stick
figures to go with the theme of minimalism. I wanted to make them posable, so I
learned about Inverse Kinematics (IK), which basically means if I have a figure
and I move the hand around, the rest of the arm will follow and bend like a
real arm. Animators are familliar with this technique. I made one stick figure
from scratch, set it up for IK, and copied it and posed each copy
individually.

I decided to have the statue man move a gigantic reflective ball so I could add
more atmosphere and detail in the room. All the other exhibits in the room are
more or less random objects. The floating green sphere with the clouds around
it are meant to give a futuristic feel to the picture, even if it has a
minimalist theme.

I didn't create any new materials or textures for this picture. They are all
stock materials from Moray. I did edit some of them or adjust a colormap to fit
what I wanted.


