TITLE: Three A.M.
NAME: Sonya Roberts
COUNTRY: Canada
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Soho/Lofts/1022
EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: three-am.jpg
ZIPFILE: three-am.zip
RENDERER USED: 
POVRay 3.01.watcom.Win32 Pentium Optimised , POVRay
3.01.msdos.wat-cwa

TOOLS USED: 
Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to add file info and convert to JPG, and to save
all screen captures.  Also to create several image maps and material maps and a
height field.
Texture Magic 0.95 for creation of many of the textures.
Torpatch for creation of the mice tails.
POVRay 3.01 Windows interface (with customized insert menu) for all coding and
test renders.
My unassisted and overworked brain to layout and plan objects.

RENDER TIME: 
Rendered in five sections over three days using both the Windows
and DOS versions of POVRay.  Total time, including being parsed five times, is
roughly 29 hours, 35 minutes for 2,469 objects.

HARDWARE USED: 
Pentium Pro 200 w/64 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg Graphics
Card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
It's 3:00 a.m. near the end of the semester.  Students are working in the
computer lab 24 hours a day trying to get their final assignments completed. 
Some are working on multimedia projects in Director, others on animations and
models in either Animator Studio or 3D Studio Max.  They're manipulating images
in Photoshop, and assembling audio/video projects and demo-reels using Adobe
Premiere.  Some are creating web sites.  Some are playing games or surfing the
web for a few minutes to relax.  And could that be someone's resume on the
first monitor in the third row?  It is!  Guess who's!

Thankfully they've all stepped out of the room for a minute so I don't have to
show you a student (going outside for a smoke, to the cafeteria to get pop or a
snack out of the vending machines, down the hall to the editing suites to
render projects to tape or use the scanners, down the street to the 24-hours
donut shop for another jolt of warm caffeine...)  They tend to look rather
grotty at 3:00 a.m.

This late at night the students often work with the florescents turned off and
the pot lights dimmed, the room instead being wierdly lit by the glow of the
many monitors.  Someone always brings in an assortment of video tapes -
sometimes it's X-Files, or the Simpsons, or James Bond.  Tonight it's an old
favorite that's available in wide assortment all the time in the student
lounge; Monty Python videos.  At this moment on screen, a man is complaining
about the death of his Norwegian Blue Parrot.

And while the signs on the walls clearly state that food and drink are forbidden
(you can loose your lab priviledges for breaking any of the posted rules),
snacks are out in abundant variety.  One thoughful soul has even laid in a
24-hour supply of pizza.  With the number of student in tonight though, he'll
be lucky if they last until morning.  Which at least eliminates the question of
where he can stash all those boxes during the day when the lab techs and
teachers will be around to notice little things like the presence of food or
the absence of mousepads.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
The entire image is loosely based on a real computer lab at my school, Room 110.
 I've taken a bit of artistic license with it so that objects are where I want
them to be and so on.  In real life, for example, those warning posters are
only 11x17, but that's too small to be readable at this resolution.  They also
phrase things differently (though the three rules are still essentially the
same).  I didn't even attempt to show the huge snarl of computer cabling that
actually exists among the desks.  In real life, the huge monitor is not
suspended from the ceiling or even wall-mounted - it sits on top of a tall cart
off to one side.  And so on...

As usual, my image makes extensive use of my two favorite commands, #while and
rand().  The desks, chairs, computers, monitors, keybords, mice, mousepads, and
zip drives are all placed using nested loops and the rand() command to add a
bit of natural variance to their positions.  Each desk and chair and the
objects on it is a single union (not including snacks and the candles by which
someone has been playing Heretic, which are all individually placed).  As a
result, the bottom half of the image renders considerably faster than the
ceiling does; it only takes a comparitively few tests for POV to figure out
what objects are in a pixel's path.

Now that I've finally gotten around to using them, I'm finding I'm using
superellipsoids a LOT.  The desk top is made of two superellipsoids.  The
computer chair seat and back and the curved metal bit joining them are
superellipsoids, as is the seat and back of the plain chairs.  So are several
portions of the monitor, and the zip drives.  The pot lights are hollowed-out
superellipsoids, while the metal support strips for the suspended celing are
very elongated superellipsoids.

The images on the monitors are screen captures distributed using the rand()
function - I played around with the seed value until I got a visible
arrangement I like.  There is a 2x2 area light in front of any monitor with an
image, simulating the monitor glow.  This in part is why the image takes so
long to render - there are many, many light sources in the room.  Plus an
atmosphere to make the cones of light from the pot lights and track lights
visible.

I'm particularly proud of my keyboard - the top was created as a height field,
and looks very good even in close-up scale, as it's quite detailed.  Used
gradients and feathering and so on to make the shape of the heyboard surface
and the keys be just what I wanted.  I also created a material map based on
this image map so that I could make my keys be a darker plastic than the rest
of the keyboard.  I'll be adding this height field to my POV web site
(http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/1022) so anyone who wants to can grab it
and use it (just please acknowledge it's use).

The drive area on the computers is also a height field, though in this view it
doesn't show up very noticeably.

This image also used a lot of image maps; ten different computer screens, the
image on the TV screen, the pattern on the plate of Oreo cookies, two different
pop cans (I resurrected my "Buzz Cola" from my July-August '96 entry "Bait",
plus created a new "Zapped Cola" label).  The little square label on the PC's
is an image map based on my personal logo. The sides and top of the pizza boxes
are also image maps ("Ms. B's PIZZA" is a reference to my other web site, Ms.
Barrow's Consensual Reality).  Then there's the warning poster, and four framed
examples of student artwork (all my own, naturally - two were created in POV
and two in 3D Studio Max).  I'd thought of doing another image for writing on
the white board at the front of the class, but as it's not visible in this view
I thought that was maybe going a little overboard *GRIN*.

There is, by the way, a bonus image tucked away in my ZIP file - "display.tga"
is a close-up view of an earlier version of the class layout, showing the
nearest desk in detail - the keyboard, the PC, the pop cans, etc.