Copper Pin wrote:

> 
> I for one wasn't convinced by the sepia tint.  To me it looked like a
> full-colour world where everything happened to be coloured in shades of
> brown.  

And of course, the technique used to try and get the effect, while 
inventive, was doomed.  But the failed attempt, for his purposes, was at 
a minimum, good enough, and on reflection, its effect as you describe, 
*of recreating a world of sepia tints*, is just what he was trying to 
do. That lost world of the Bluebird, now enshrined in sepia is just 
where Bob wants to take us.

Bob was trying to create the appearance of a sepia tinted and aged 
photograph in a single pass, something raytracing is uniquely not 
equipped for.  A two-step process which first created the photographic 
object, then made a tracing of it directly might have been more 
successful.  Still, the method he did use is a highly entertaining 
experiment.  By sampling from a pretraced and externally tinted image 
based on his scene, then recoloring his 3d scene to match, he did 
acknowledge the stepped process that would be necessary.  But instead of 
reproducing an accurate record of a photograph, he may have entered what 
has been termed the "metareality" of a photograph.  That point where its 
physicality is indistinguishable from its illusion.  Now I realize that 
Bob was not trying to engage such an inquiry; he was just trying to find 
a way to marry the concept of "old" with an example of "technology". 
But what he did do was challenge the limits of raytracing, and opened 
some possibly interesting doors in the process.  I applaud his bold attempt.

The result makes me think about what's elemental: sea, sky, the near 
geometric plane of the beach, sepia tones, and of course,... speed.

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