I thought I'd post this image (obviously), even though it's not my latest
work.

Story:
I discovered POV-Ray in August, 2002 when version 3.5 was released.  I'd
seen it before, but never really understood what it was all about, and had
left unimpressed.  Well, for whatever reason, POV-Ray made a huge impression
on me this time around.  Perhaps because I had visited Gilles Tran's site,
the IRTC, and many others out there (Christophe, Jaime, Txemi and others).
Many of you have really inspired me.

So... I after checking out all of the sample scenes for several days, I
decided to try to make some stuff of my own.  I had a large (cheap) wooden
cabinet/armoir in my basement, and it seemed like I should be able to model
it pretty well.  So I did.

After that, I decided "Hey, why not model my whole basement?"  So I did.
Soon after that, I reliazed that this would be a great opportunity to play a
trick on my brother and convince him that I had put in a drop ceiling in my
recently "finished" basement.  I still don't have baseboard trim or a drop
ceiling in my real basement, but I added both to the picture.  I spent many,
many, many hours trying to get everything just right, and learned tons about
POV-Ray in the process.

After I got the picture completed, I put it through The Gimp and added a
lens flare and blurred the image.  Now I realize that I could have done
those things in POV, but at the time, I didn't know that...  Anyway, the
idea was to get it to look like a crappy picture from my obsolete digital
camera.

The plan/joke worked perfectly, and my brother fell for it.  He
congratulated me on the changes to my basement and mentioned how proud he
was, etc.  Doh!  Now I had to tell him that it was a fake!  After
confessing, he seemed less impressed with my rendering abilities, than he
would have been with my carpentry skills.  I think it may have taken me less
time and effort to actually make changes to my real basement, and would have
garnered more praise from my family, but hey, I'm a geek, and doing things
in the virtual world are more intriguing than the real world.  *sigh*

It's an old picture so I'm not really asking for critiques, but feel free to
comment on anything you wish.  I don't remember how long this took to
render, but I used some, likely limited, radiosity, so I'm guessing it took
an hour or two on my Athlon XP 1800+ (originally 1024x768, shrunk and
blurred later).

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Attachments:
Download 'BasementBest.jpg' (23 KB)

Preview of image 'BasementBest.jpg'

I should mention:

The chair is from Gilles Tran, and the books and bookshelf are from his
library macro.

All else is original, iirc.

FYI: My daughter's red-ball and yellow balloon were actually in my basement,
when I created this picture.

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That's a great story.  I think that's the first Pov-Ray practical joke
I've heard of.  Most people just use image editing software like
photoshop..."And here's me with Gerald Ford!"  Even if you didn't really
finish your basement, you were still being creative and having fun, so
that's more important than having a finished basement, huh?

-Ben Scheele

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"Ben T. Scheele" <sch### [at] tcumnedu> wrote in message
news:3e32d1bd@news.povray.org...
... Even if you didn't really
> finish your basement, you were still being creative and having fun, so
> that's more important than having a finished basement, huh?
>

That's easy for us POV-Ray users to say anyhow... ;-)

But aside from all of that, it was actually a practical way to look at how
different changes would look in my basement.  For example, what if the walls
were red?  What color should I stain the trim? (when I do it)  What type of
drop ceiling looks best?  What if the floor wasn't covered with toys? (hehe)

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