About 'Doing Time' by J.Peterson.

-1. If you use large, unaltered chunks of any of this
stuff, please attribute it to be. And don't charge for it.

0. OK. I'm afraid I was far to busy organising the
IRTC competition to do a very good entry, but I hope
you like it, or find it interesting. I'm afraid I really
didn't have time to tidy up the source code, which is
in the most part pretty messy and un-commented. Here
are some casual observations about the scene.

1. I used alot of texture maps in this and they worked
well. With the new parsing option in POV 3.0 I found
it quite simple to get things matching up first time.
I used Fauve Matisse for most of the stuff. It is a
very original but flawed program, but by far the most
you'll get for that money. Although I have access to 
Photoshop and FD Painter at work, I prefer to use
Matisse and Paint Shop Pro. They are just so much
simpler for this kind of work.

2.I spent 30% of the time on this picture on getting
the camera angle right. When you are doing a room, 
things like ceiling height, where (or if) the corners
are visible, and the angle between the floor and the 
camera are crucial. I spent hours with just the four
walls and the floor and ceiling, messing about.

3.As always I drew the scene by hand first. I know many
people use POV because it allows them to get a realism
that seems impossible by hand, and I suppose I can draw
pretty well by hand, but I think it helps. In the same
way a programmer can avoid distaster with a simplistic
flow diagram on a bit of scrap paper, the POV artist
can save alot of effort with a bit of rough sketching. Even
if you just draw circles and boxes to mark the position
of the main items in the scene, it is worth doing.

4.The scene is sort of to scale. 1 unit is 1 meter.
However, some things are lying. The bed is about right,
but most of the pipework is too large, so it shows up.
The door is far to small (about 1.3 meters high). If you
render in 1280x1024 this shows up.

5. I think the rust and old metal textures on the ladder
and pipework (respectively) are great. Use them, but keep
them scaled down are they look... well, I'll let you find out.

6. There were going to be more things on the walls, but
I ran out of time.

7. Originally the sunlight from above was going to go
through an 'atmosphere' so leave nice rays, but I couldn't
get it right, and it slowed down rendering unacceptably.

8. As always, no yucky wireframe modellers were used. Just
the povEdit thing that comes with the Windows version of
POV3.0 Beta. I don't believe in wire frame modellers at
all, and thinkt they should be banned. Well, ok, maybe they
are useful sometimes, but the POV sytax is so good, it's
a pleasure to use it. Utilities have their place, and there
are lots of good ones, but big 'all in one' modellers aren't
my thing.

9. Me:
	I'm a WWW page designer who has been using POV
for three and a bit years. I hope to edit a tutorial
for POV 3.0 (I wrote a tutorial for 2.2 and I know I don't
have time for that again).

Well, if you want me to explain anything else, or just
talk about your or my pictures..

azathoth@zippy.spods.dcs.kcl.ac.uk
or talk to comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing 


Happy tracing,

	Jon Peterson