TITLE: The Turn of the Screw
NAME: Maurizio Tomasi
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78
TOPIC: Mistery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mtscrew.jpg
ZIPFILE: mtscrew.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POVRay 3.5 (final render) and MegaPOV 1.0 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 

- Paint Shop Pro 7.0 (height field creation, title, JPEG conversion)

- PoseRay 2.6.6.202

- Poser 4

- sPatch 1.5

- GNU Guile 1.6.1 (my own Windows 2000 recompile)


RENDER TIME: 

    
HARDWARE USED: 

        AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James is a novel whose main character
is a young governess appointed to look after two children, Miles and
Flora, which live in an old country house.  After her arrival to the
mansion, some puzzling events make her think that two ghosts, Peter
Quint and Miss Jessel, haunt the house trying to corrupt the two
children.

  The main interest of the novel lies in its ambiguity.  It is not
possible to determine whenether the ghosts are real or a creation of
the girl's mind, since she is the only one which interacts with them:
Miles, Flora and the servants never see -- or admit to see -- Quint
nor Miss Jessel.  This should not force the reader to think that she's
crazy -- only that this hypotesis cannot be excluded.  You can find a
detailed analysis of the text at
http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/screw/summ1.html.

The image was mainly inspired by the following passage, although I
chose not to reproduce the text faithfully:

    "I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I
    went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came
    within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn
    of the staircase.  At this point I precipitately found myself
    aware of three things.  They were practically simultaneous, yet
    they had flashes of succession.  My candle, under a bold flourish,
    went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the
    yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary.
    Without it, the next instant, I knew that there was a figure on
    the stair.  I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of
    seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint.  The
    apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on
    the spot nearest the window, where, at sight of me, it stopped
    short and fixed me..." (Chapter IX)

The image shows the moment when the lady sees Quint on the stairway,
and instinctively draws back while turning to Miles sleeping in his
bedroom.

After last round there has been a little debate on the IRTC newsgroup
whenether or not write a detailed interpretation of the entries in the
text file.  After some thoughts I decided not to explain the
composition in detail: the viewer's sensitivity will be enough.  A
good starting-point is to consider how warm and cold colors are used
in the image.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:


* Overall layout 

  I drew at least three different sketches before actually beginning
to write POV code.  It was difficult to choose a reasonable
architecture for what I had in mind: first I considered another
passage in the book (chapter IV), where Quint appears behind one
window of the dining-room.  After having chosen the actual passage, I
thought of an asymmetric stairway (it turned like a "U").  This was
not satisfactory, since Peter Quint's shadow would have been hardly
visible.  I drew another sketch which was very similar to the actual
image, and this was quite good: the new stairway (forking like an "Y")
allowed a larger landing halfway where to place Quint.


* Parquet

  I wrote a Scheme program named "parquet.scm" to create "parquet.inc"
(which contains the set of floor woodbricks).  A description of how to
use it is included at the beginning of the source code.


* Carpets
  
  They are made by a very thin box with a layered texture (using bozo
and dents patterns) placed into a larger box with a rectangular hole
in it (to create the red border).  No image maps are used.  The
threads are sphere sweeps randomly placed by a macro.


* Walls

  The wall texture is an image map in the top part (I took inspiration
from a little jevel-case owned by my aunt); the bottom part is a
functional texture (if there had been more light, this texture would
have looked ugly! But in this case it works quite well).


* Lamp-holders

  Lamp-holders are made by two heightfields.  The lamp glass and
support are meshes created with sPatch.  An area light is placed
inside the glass bowl.  The flame is an isosurface filled with
emitting media (see lamps.inc for details).  There is an emitting
sphere centered into the lamp glass to get a faint glow.


* Bed

  I used the symcloth feature of MegaPOV 1.0 applied to an height
field (bed_hf.png, in the zip file).  Miles' head is a Poser model,
while the pillow is an sPatch model manually placed under the head
(hardest than it sounds!).

  The bed head and tail (are these the correct english names?) are
height fields (I used the same technique of my old "Sewing Machine").
The truck is pure CSG.


* Table in the foreground

  The table is a prism.  The granite surface uses the same prism
vertexes with a sphere sweep running along the border to soften the
edges.

  The vase and the candles are sPatch models (each candle has its own
model).

  Flowers are pure isosurfaces (!).  I applied a quasi-spherical
transformation to a function with many spikes and added an agate
pigment to increase randomness (see the "CreateRose" macro and the
various comments in "rose.inc").


* Table on the left of the door

  Basic primitives.  The vase with flowers is a 3DS model I found on
the 3DCafe' website.


* The shadow on the wall

  It is a box with a partially transparent image_map (leopold.png in
the zip file).  I drew the silhouette with PSP starting from a
portrait of Leopold I King of Belgium by Lievin Dewinne (1822-1880).


* Painting on the wall

  "The island of dead", by the swiss painter Arnold Boecklin
(1827-1901).  I think it is an appropriate painting to be placed above
Quint's shadow.


* Two small portraits on the right of the door

  The upper portrait is a photo of my sister Flavia.  The lower
portrait is a painting by Theodore Gericault ("The mad" -- a reference
to the lady?).


* Lady

  Two weeks ago I bought Poser 4.0 and decided to create a model of
the girl to place in this scene (during the first month I worked on
the image supposing it was seen through the girl's eyes).  I worked
quite hard to create an XIX century dress using only the built-in
props!  For the gown texture I used a carpet image both as image_map
and bump_map; for the shirt I used only a bump_map in order to get
those wrinkles.  Hairs by Gerald Day (http://www.fast3d.co.uk).

  I placed one of the two candles on the table in the lady's hand.  I
simply loaded it into Poser as a DXF file and used it as a prop.  To
correctly place the light source on the candletop I assigned a bright
green texture to it and searched in the POV mesh file for the
triangles using this texture.  Then, I noted down the coordinates and
removed these triangles.


* Lights

Apart the two lamps, there are six other light sources: (1) a light
coming from outside and projecting Peter Quint's shadow on the wall
(area spotlight), (2) a light entering Miles' room and illuminating
the bed, (3) a point light on the stairways (it adds nice shadows to
the banisters), (4) a point light placed where the observer is (it
lights up a bit the table) (4) the candle hold by the young lady and
(5) a blue light illuminating the bed curtains (in a light_group).

The zip file does not contains the Poser model, some image maps and
many .inc files that can be created by the sPatch files.  But the POV
code is all there.

Maurizio Tomasi
