TITLE: A Scholler's Tools
NAME: Jeff Lee
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: shipbrk@gate.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/raytrace
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jslschol.jpg
ZIPFILE: jslschol.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0 for OS/2 (unofficial compile)

TOOLS USED: 
    OS/2 System Editor, Corel Draw 3.0, PhotoFinish, LView Pro 1.B/16

RENDER TIME: 
    27 hours 9 minutes 48.0 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix 6x86-166+ (32 MB, OS/2 Warp v4.0), HP ScanJet 4c

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


   This image is a portrayal of some of the  materials  needed  by  a  young
   scholar (or, indeed, a mature scholar) around the turn of the seventeenth
   century, as mentioned in a short work entitled "Rules made  by  F.B.  for
   Children  to  write  by".   These  "Rules"  were  contained  in a book of
   penmanship published in 1611 by  Richard  Field.   (A  complete  copy  of
   the  "Rules" may be found at <http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/writing.html>,
   and explains, among other things, why a piece of bread is included.)

   Some might object because the quill pen does not  include  the  barbs  of
   the  feather,  which  are invariably left on the quill in "period" movies
   and television shows.  I am not cheating by  drawing  only the calamus --
   indeed,  I am attempting to make the image more historically accurate; in
   reality, the barbs were removed (primarily to  make  the  pen  easier  to
   handle), as instructed in the "Rules":

           The feather shaue off,the quill do not pare,
           The stronger your pen in hand you may beare. 

   In other words, shave off the barbs, but don't cut  into  the  shaft,  as
   doing so will weaken the pen.

   A more detailed description of the objects in the image  is  provided  in
   the "readme.txt" file in the source archive.

   (A note about the title: yes, I *do*  know  how  to  spell  "scholar";  I
   merely  chose  to  use early-17th-century orthography rather than modern,
   in keeping with the atmosphere of the image.)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


   The scene was designed by hand, using  pencil  sketches  as  a  guide  to
   composition  and  placement.   The POV source files were created with the
   basic OS/2 text editor (i.e., no modellers were used).

   The calligraphy was done by hand, and scanned  with  an  HP  ScanJet  4c.
   Using  PhotoFinish,  I manually converted the multiple tones of the paper
   to a single shade, so  that  I  could  use  that  palette  index  as  the
   transparent colour for the image map.

   Several objects (such as the  lathe  portions  of  the  candlestick,  the
   inkwell,  and  the  Tudor-style  house  dimly visible through the window)
   were drafted in CorelDraw 3.0, in lieu of graph  paper  (by  clicking  on
   each  of  the  individual  points within the curves, I was able to easily
   ascertain the coordinates of each point, which  I  then  typed  into  the
   source file -- tedious, but it works).

   The meshes used for the brass candlestick were created with  the  aid  of
   a  hand  calculator.  It would have been easier to create only one set of
   facets and then create the others by using a #while  loop  and  "rotate";
   unfortunately, I didn't think of that until after I was finished.

   The majority of the quill pen comprises a  mesh  that  is  created  using
   nested  #while  loops;  because most of the calamus has a cardioid cross-
   section, as well as a slight curve along its length,  I  opted  to  allow
   POV-Ray to do the calculations rather than doing them myself.

   Although a few of the textures come from  the  standard  POV-Ray  include
   files  (particularly the metal textures), the majority of them are my own
   creation.  Colour values were arrived at by trial and error, though I did
   estimate  several  of  them  by changing a spare OS/2 folder's background
   colour and copying out the values (these are the ones that have RGB values
   like "209/255" rather than "0.8196" in the source).

   The most challenging aspect of the image was  in  accurately  reproducing
   the  patterns  of wear on the spines of the books.  I used three books as
   the models (well, four really, but two of them were a two-volume set that
   were  more  or  less identical), and each was made of a different kind of
   leather, with different amounts of damage, and different kinds of "ribs".

   The first book that I modelled (book1.inc and book2.inc)  had  a  doeskin
   spine  that  was incredibly smooth and somewhat hard.  Small chips of the
   finished leather had been worn away, especially on the  ribs  and  edges.
   This  was  fairly  easily  accomplished  with a gradient y map, with each
   stratum (corresponding to an edge, rib, or inter-rib space) using a  bozo
   pattern  with  a  different  ratio  of  scuffed/unscuffed  leather  and a
   different scale.

   The second book (book4.inc) had an incredible amount  of  damage  on  the
   spine.   Very  few  finished  bits of leather remained, and two strata of
   suede-ish leather were showing.  This was  fairly  simple  to  accomplish
   with  an  overall  bozo  pattern.  Fortunately, the title had been rubbed
   off the original, so I didn't worry about how I was going to  get  it  to
   show  only on the finished bits. 

   The remaining book (book3.inc) scared me, so I left it for last.  On this
   one,  the spine had torn off from both the top and bottom, and there were
   cracks on the  leather  covering  the  centre  bits  of  each  rib,  with
   unfinished leather showing on the top and bottom torn edges.  The binding
   leather underneath was wrinkled where it had conformed to  the  shape  of
   the quires (gatherings of pages), and was scuffed at both top and bottom.

   I eventually ended up using a four-layers-deep special  texture  for  the
   spine,  which  comprised several layers of special textures.  Overall, it
   was a gradient along the Y axis, similar to that in book1.inc,  but  each
   of  the  segments corresponding to a rib was a "gradient x" texture which
   blended from a "crackle" texture at the centre (primarily unscuffed, with
   the  scuffed  texture  in  the  cracks) to plain unscuffed leather at the
   edges.  While the ribs on the other books were made of tori added to  the
   spines,  this  book  used  tori differenced from the spine, and stretched
   along the Y axis to produce a curve up to the flat rib surface.

   In retrospect, I should have moved the cork closer to the centre  of  the
   image,  as  the  edge  distortion  produced by the perspective camera has
   distended it to the point that it looks as though it is intersecting  the
   table,  even  though  close-ups with an orthographic camera say it isn't.
   Unfortunately, there wasn't time to re-render, so I'm stuck with it.

   I rendered using  +a0.05,  which  yielded  a  fairly  reasonable  quality
   (although  it increased the render time markedly).  I used the unofficial
   OS/2 compile of POV-Ray 3.0 found on the povray.org ftp site.

   When the image was finished rendering, I converted it  to  a  JPEG  using
   LView Pro with the quality set at 85%, and entropy optimisation enabled.

   The image files containing the portraits, calligraphy and book pages were
   excluded  from  the  source  zipfile for reasons of space; please send me
   email if you would like a copy.

