I can be quite a talker at times, so be warned... ;-)

> One of the nicest things about this image (that I failed to mention in the
> comments file) is the farm in the background. So many of the Old
Technology
> entries had objects with very little background. Of course we all know the
> reason for this: even objects in the background require a lot of work to
> look good, and there's a time limit on this competition. But the farm,
> fields, hills, and sky in this image make a great environment. Jeremy
> obviously spent a lot of time on them.

I've had mixed feelings about the farm myself.  But since I live in an area
surrounded by farms, it was an easy place to get inspiration.  I would
slowly drive by silos on my way home from work.  Many of them are rusty,
which gives them much more character.  I hope to do a farm scene some day.
Or perhaps several scenes.

> I notice one of the comments suggested a radio tower instead of a farm in
> the background. I'm not sure that would gain much, and might be a
> distraction.
>
> Someone also mentioned the grass should be more glossy. I wonder if the
> color of the sunlight shining on the grass might be the reason the grass
> appears less glossy. Is the sunlight a yellowish light, or pure white?

The sunlight was quite yellow.  Additionally, there is a big yellow spot in
the sky around it.  The grass began to look really blue when the radiosity
would reflect it from the blue sky.  I made the sky a little more
grey-white, and added the yellow gradient.

> I was very impressed with the grass, with good weeds. How they were kept
> from passing into the radios?

They weren't!  Actually, I rotated them slightly around X or Z, giving them
a tilt which avoided the problem for the most part.  I'm sure there are
places where they pass into the radios, but even at 3200x2400 it would be
difficult to spot.

> Someone mentioned the prominance of the fence. I wonder what this image
> would look like with a little more sky, or a shorter fence? As it is the
> fence top fills the sky, and it has a bit of an ominous look (well, it is
a
> graveyard :-). Speaking of which, this is the second winner in a row
> dealing with death...maybe we need a "Funny" round.

The fence was originally taller and closer.  It's only about 40" tall, IIRC.
Any shorter, and it would have been less realistic.  It's also a few yards
away from the radios, though it's difficult to tell.

> Of course the radios themselves are great, and they're so many of them! I
> really like the plasticy-wood surface of the radios, very realistic
> looking, and it gives the image a classy feel.

I spent countless hours working on the textures and finishes. Even so, I'm
not 100% satisfied.  Maybe 90%.  I'm going from memory, but I believe the
wood texture was a granite and bozo texture stretched out to look like a
wood grain.  Then I overlayed a stretched agate pattern on top of that, for
the color variation.  I tried using the woods.inc, but eventually abandoned
it, and made my own.  Some of them also had turbulence added.  Then I used,
"warp {repeat 2*x flip <1,0,0> " to flip-flop the textures to look like wood
veneer.

Some things that went wrong...
* Lighting:  It's too dark, imho, and I ran out of time before I could
figure out what to do about it.
* Focal blur:  A small amount of focal blur was necessary or the image_maps
of the grille cloths looked very bad.  For the final render, I had set blur
samples to 200, but it would have probably taken 3 months to render.  I
ended up leaving it at 50 samples.  That caused some graininess, especially
in the large background tree in the middle.

Other thoughts...
Overall, I tried to do this without using things like Poser, X-frog,
pre-built models etc.  Probably because I don't own any of those things. ;-)
But more to the point, since I don't own those things, I wanted to show
what's possible using just POV-Ray, and a few other simple, mostly free
tools.  I think some of the scoring may have taken that into account, but
that's just my feeling.

Finally, I'd like to thank my wife, Angela (aka Mrs. Dolt), for supporting
me on this.  It can get lonely coming home from work and spending the next 5
hours working on an IRTC entry.  Lonely for both of us.  That may be why
Gena's "Lonliness" entry had such an impact on so many.

--
Slash

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