TITLE: Recess
NAME: Charlie Tangora
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: charlie495@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.latin.pvt.k12.il.us/users/2000/ctangora/
TOPIC: school
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ctreces.jpg
ZIPFILE: ctreces.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Blob Sculptor, POVSB, LParser, a text editor, and my trusty
            graph paper

RENDER TIME: 
    36 05 59 total

HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix 586-100 MHz, 36 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    When I saw the theme, the first thing that popped to mind was an apple
  on a teacher's desk - I see tons of images like that in school propaganda.
  I figured there'd be about 87,364 entries like that. My imagination
  wouldn't provide me with anything better, though, so I started to think
  about variations on the idea. I had already thought of creating some CSG
  robots for my own entertainment, so one day in the middle of P.E. (I do
  most of my thinking there) I thought of combining the two ideas, and the
  scene wrote itself from there.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    Too little time, too little processing power. The image with everything
  in it would probably have taken well over two thousand hours to render.
  I wound up isolating the time hogs and taking them out. I lost the text
  on the book spines and my lovely soft shadows. Anybody wanna buy me an
  SGI?

    The robots' heads and bodies were done in Blob Sculptor, the tree was one
  of the sample files that came with LParser, and the apple was done with a
  lathe, a bezier patch, and a clipped torus in POVSB. Everything else was
  done with my handy graph paper and text editor (haven't failed me yet!),
  including robotic legs and arms.

    Never underestimate the power of the superquadric ellipsoid! Huge thanks
  to whatever visionary put that in POV-Ray 3. Half the shapes in the scene
  are based on it. The book covers are superellipsoids, the corners of the
  blotter-what-do-you-call-it are superellipsoids - I could go on for a long
  time.

    Now, I wanted to have sunlight streaming through the windows and
  illuminating the scene, but half my textures need the normal manipulation
  (and hence sone diffuse light shining on them) to look like anything. What
  to do? Finally, instead of ambient light, I modeled a giant 8x8 area_light
  up by the ceiling of the scene. As far as rendering times go, that was
  stupid, but it made the ambient light in the scene look _great_, possibly
  even better than radiosity could have done it (And I wanted the 'trace to
  be done by the year 2175, so radiosity didn't bear thinking about.)
  Unfortunately, deadlines caught up with me, and I had to cut out all my
  area lights.

    The robots were tons of fun to do. I used at least 86,000 rotations and
  translations to ensure that at some point or another, the arm/leg/whatever
  could be rotated around the right center. Then I spent hours upon hours
  trying to figure out which axis to rotate the arms and legs about - and by
  how much - in order to get the pose I wanted. (I'm sure you've heard of
  inverse kinematics. This is forward trial-and-error kinematics. Much less
  fun. Also much cheaper. Since my raytracing budget for the year was about 8
  cents, I really didn't have much choice, now did I?)

    Teztures are from a variety of sources. The wood textures are my own 
  versions of the textures in "woods.inc." The leather is a version of a
  texture I found on the net; I couldn't find the site again to give credit.
  The metal is straight out of textures.inc. All other textures are my own.

    WARNING: If you download the source, don't expect to get much use out of
  it. I am not neat. I will not understand the source myself in a few months'
  time. Also, I cut out a good bit of the larger program-generated files.
  There is no tree, the apple is composed of much fewer polygons, and you'll
  have to come up with your own images for the papers on the table. Just give
  it any two Targas named "hw.tga" and "hw1.tga."

