EMAIL: afishionado@gmail.com
NAME: William Tracy
TOPIC: Before and After
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Aging
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.csc.calpoly.edu/~wtracy
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6
TOOLS USED: Kate, Vim, ImageMagick (viewing output), The Gimp (viewing output
and converting to JPG).
RENDER TIME: Nine minutes.
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon, 2GHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This scene is not great, but its not getting much better. The idea
was that the glasses would represent before (youth), and the cane would
represent after (old age). Originally, I wanted to have the cane to be in the
foreground (it is the present that you can't get away from), but have it be out
of focus--the person's attention is still on the past, off in the distance.

It didn't work out quite as well as I hoped. :-P The early version on p.b.i is
a little closer to what I originally envisioned, but it didn't really work. I'm
still up in the air about whether my changes really do constitute an actual
improvement.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
For the surreal white environment, I first set the scene's background color to
white. I built a ground surface with a white pigment, and used a parallel light
to illuminate it evenly. I cranked up the light until the RGB value of
the output image was actually white, matching the background.

The glasses are built with prisms using cubic splines. They are outlined with
sphere_sweeps to get the nice rounded edges. Everything else in the scene is
built with pure CSG.