TITLE: Wet
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: smfwet.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (signature and jpg
compression only)

RENDER TIME: 
    6 hr 49 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.4 GHz Thunderbird; 512 MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  
  A computer artist takes a break from his latest creation and stretches out on
the floor to play his favorite computer game.  Before long, he falls asleep,
and dreams of his favorite computer game heroine.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  First of all, I'd like to make it quite clear that Lara Croft is a registered
trademark of Core Design, Ltd.

  Once again, I find myself having created a scene with no intention of doing
so.  Since I moved to a new apartment in mid-May, and had no time to render for
the first month of this round, I decided to take this round off.  As you can
see, it didn't quite work out that way.  I started playing around with
rendering the new computer desk I bought, then added a room to fill out the
scene.  Then just for fun I decided to try adding a person, and it occured to
me that if I stretched him out on the floor, I could have him dreaming of his
dream woman.  At first, it was just going to be a generic fantasy woman, but I
started thinking about what kind of woman this guy would be dreaming about, and
an image of Lara Croft popped into my head as being the ultimate computer geek
fantasy.  So there you have it.

  Okay, now for the technical stuff.  With the obvious exception of the people,
almost everything in the scene is CSG.  The various cords were done using
sphere_sweeps, and the lamp base is a lathe.  The painting is an image_map of
my entry to the Fortress round, and the frame was taken as is from my entry to
the Worlds Within Worlds round.  The monitor display is a screenshot I took of
my desktop, using a wallpaper I created and an unfinished project for the scene
being rendered.  The pillow is made of blobs, and looks pretty horrible... I
just couldn't seem to get anything good in the time I had available.

  The people are blob objects.  I used the man from my entry to the Worship
round to start, but put in a lot of work getting it to look the way it does
here.  Since the man's legs were hidden behind the altar in the original scene,
I had never actually given him legs, so I had to create them from scratch here.
 Repositioning the arms and hands was a lot of work, as it involves moving
around lots of small spherical blob components through trial and error until I
get something that looks okay.  I also reworked most of the facial features to
try to get them to look better, especially the ears (which still don't look
great, but look better than they did originally).  

  Then I tried to create clothes, using the technique of scaling down the blob
threshold value slightly, combined with increasing the radius of each
individual component.  It still doesn't look anywhere near as good as I would
like, but gives the impression of clothes, at least.  The shoes are blob
objects as well, and use the sphere_sweep object for the laces.

  As for Lara, I took the man and with a lot of tweaking, turned him into a
woman.  Added breasts, narrowed the waist and upper body, repositioned the
arms, reshaped the legs slightly, redid the facial features yet again, added
hair and accessories (glasses, guns, holsters, etc), and redid the clothing.  I
think her clothing turned out a little better than his jeans did.  All in all,
about 75% of the time spent on this scene involved reworking the figures and
creating the clothing.
  
  I'm still trying to get the hang of radiosity... my settings seem to work
pretty well here, but there is some obvious artifacting that I was unable to
get rid of. I tried tweaking the settings, using the tips in the docs, but to
no avail.  Still, it definitely appears better lit with the radiosity than it
does without, so I guess that's a start.

  Well, guess that's it for this round.  Looking forward to hearing your
comments/criticisms... they're definitely appreciated!  

