TITLE: The Pool
NAME: Christoph Hormann
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: chris_hormann@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: chpool.jpg
ZIPFILE: chpool.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 1.1 beta

TOOLS USED: 

   Photoshop for jpeg conversion
   HCR-Edit for brightness/exposure adjustments
   XEmacs/Internal WinPov-Editor for coding

   Gilles Tran's maketree macro:
   http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm

   IsoCSG library: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/pov/ic/
   IsoWood include file: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/iso_wood.html


RENDER TIME: 
    12 hours (pretrace) + 26 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1 GHz, 512 Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Welcome to my house, take a bath, enjoy the sunny weather...

A lot of images submitted to this round are probably outside views
of well known or not so well known buildings. That's what we
associate with 'architecture', what we see as the most obvious
manifestations of it.

But of course the design of the interior of a building also belongs
to this.  The planning of the lighting of rooms to create a lively
atmosphere for example is a difficult task.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I admit when i created the first elements of this scene i was not
planning for it to be submitted to the IRTC.  But at some point when
i had created a first rough draft of the room i remembered the
current topic and thought it could be developed further to be an
appropriate submission.

The original intent was to test and demonstrate the new capabilities
of coming MegaPOV 1.1 of dealing with strong contrasts in scenes
with global illumination and of writing high dynamic range output.
The source code is not included since the features required for
correctly rendering it are not yet published but there will be a
simplified version of it as a demo scene in next MegaPOV.  The zip
file only contains a smaller render of the scene in RADIANCE rgbe
(hdr) format with unclipped colors.

The room is modelled with good old CSG.  The furniture in the
foreground is made with my IsoWood include file.  The sculpture is a
blob object, the tree outside made with Gilles Tran's maketree.  The
towel is simulated using mechsim with self collision which took
ridiculously long to calculate...

The scene uses photons on the ground, the water and the sculpture,
150 Mb of photons in total.  The radiosity calculation was done in a
pretrace without reflection and raised error_bound in the final
trace.

The image was slightly brightness corrected before converting to low
dynamic range.  Some words concerning the lighting - it is not
intended to be physically accurate but i tried to achieve a fairly
realistic appearance.  A room partly in light, partly in shadow
like this involves very high contrasts, much too high to be
correctly represented on either a photographic film or a computer
monitor.  When taking a photo you have the problem the shadow parts
are completely dark when you adjust the exposure time to the bright
parts or the bright areas are overexposed when you adjust for the
dark areas.  In a synthetical image you have the advantage that you
can adjust the scene to diminish this problem but if you do so too
much the scene no more appears realistic.

