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- EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
- NAME: Paul T. Dawson
- TOPIC: Glass
- COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
- TITLE: We Break The Glass
- COUNTRY: U.S.A.
- WEBPAGE: http://www.voicenet.com/~ptdawson
- RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.00 for DOS
- TOOLS USED: DOS Edit, PhotoFinish, Coffee
- RENDER TIME: About 3 hours
- HARDWARE USED: AMD 486-120 with 20 megs RAM
- IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The scene is based on the song "Showroom Dummies".
- It shows the dummies starting to move, breaking the glass, going out
- into the city, and then going into a club and starting to dance! :-)
-
- DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
-
- The first design goal was to make the scene completely gray, with
- lots of shadows, and -no- garish colors. :-)
-
- The song "Showroom Dummies", by Kraftwerk, provided the inspiration.
- Of course, the critical words in the song are:
-
- "We break the glass"
-
- There are many pieces of glass in the scene. The unbroken windows are
- made with individual panes. The jagged broken window is made with four
- polygon objects (and random numbers). The broken glass on the sidewalk
- is actually one hundred "Chrome" triangles. I couldn't use a glass
- texture there, because that wasn't very visible.
-
- The wall is built from individual blocks, all arranged with ASCII code
- modeling, right in the POV file. It would have been easier to use a
- brick texture, but I wanted the "half blocks" (next to the windows and
- doors) to look right. Check the source code to see how I did this!
-
- There are over ten lights in the scene, to make lots of shadows. For
- easy testing, I used -one- bright light, at the camera location. There
- is a switch at the top of the file to select Final_Lights=on/off.
-
- Two of the streetlights are visible, on the far sidewalk. There is one
- more streetlight, over to the right of the camera. It isn't visible,
- but it does make some nice shadows on the wall!
-
- There are several imagemaps, including the lettering on the awning,
- the spray paint on the road, the club sign, and one shirt design.
-
- The road is a PNG heightfield, with a bumpy mirror box to create
- water in the potholes. The left side door uses a GIF heightfield,
- on the lower panel. Both of those files were drawn by hand.
-
- The -dummies- (NOT people) are made with my P4 people include file.
- Although they are still rather klunky, this time they are totally
- realistic, because they are dummies, not people! 8-) The main people
- include file has one minor change, Lip_Texture. That's so I could use
- gray shaded lips, instead of the default Red.
-
- There's a little bit of fog in the scene. I would have liked to add
- a complete atmosphere, with visible light streaming out of the windows,
- but the deadline is here TODAY, so I'll leave it as simple fog.
-
- The sidewalks are made from individual superellipsoids. Each one gets
- a tiny random wiggle, so they aren't all perfectly aligned.
-
- All of the source code is in the ZIP. The main scene is fairly well
- organized, with scene switches to turn items on/off. Some of the code
- is rather wasteful (memory wise). For example, the glass and dividers
- in the upper windows go all the way across the scene. You can only see
- the parts where there is a hole in the wall. Sloppy!
-
- The final scene was done with AA threshold at 0.3, and depth 2x2.
- It uses just over 8 megs of POV memory.
-
- Well, there it is! Thanks for reading all this!
-
- P.T.D.
- February 28, 1997
-
-