This is my entry for the 3D-RTC "Before-After" round.

At the moment, I'm basically happy with this image, although I'm sure 
that someone here will point out something that I have to change. Which 
is why I'm posting it here. :-)

There are two things that still bother me a little about the image:

1. The phong highlight on the walking can in the very foreground. Before 
I added focal blur, it was a beautiful, round, highlight. Now it's 
square-shaped. I have no idea why it does this, but I think I can live 
with it.

2. The handle on the cane. I did a 180-degree half-loop. All the real 
canes continue the curve at least another 30 degrees, but 180 degrees 
was easier to do in CSG. :-) At this angle, though, I'm starting to 
think it would look a lot nicer with another 45 degrees. We'll see 
whether or not I get around to fixing it before the deadline.

Other than that, I need you guys to point out what's wrong with it. :-)

The area light and focal blur (especially the focal blur...) made this 
go from an image that renders in a few seconds to one that takes over 
twenty minutes to render on my 2 GHz Athlon. I think it's worth it, though.

The background was inspired by the "Chicken Chair" video on Blender.org
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/movies/
(About halfway down the page, on the right-hand side.) All the surfaces 
of the environment are the same color, and lit in such a way that you 
cannot distinguish the walls, floor, and ceiling from one another. 
(Which makes for some very interesting scene transitions in the original 
video, BTW.)

I set a background color of rgb 1, and a ground color of rgb 1, then 
cranked up the light until the ground rendered in the final image as 
actual #FFFFFF white. Then I had to darken down the colors (and 
highlights!) on the glasses and walking cane so that they weren't 
overexposed.

I actually used a box for the ground surface, as I knew that point 
lights tend to not illuminate the far reaches of a plane very well. Then 
I remembered that I could use a parallel light to illuminate an entire 
surface evenly. So, I could have used a plane, but I kept the cube anyway.

-- 
William Tracy
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You know you've been raytracing too long when you start perceiving 
people who don't raytrace as a lower form of life.
Taps a.k.a. Tapio Vocadlo

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