Arthur was the night janitor at the Museum of Modern Art. His wife thought most of the artwork there was pure garbage. One day, she dared her husband to do something mischievous. So, the next evening, he complied: Art could not refuse the dare to add refuse to the art. (Sorry, I like puns!)
The idea for a pile of garbage in an art museum was somewhat inspired by a visit many years ago to the National Gallery in Ottawa. I came across a pile of garbage posing as art. I wondered if anyone would notice if I were to add my beat up running shoes to the pile...
Most of the work for this image went into the modeling and positioning of the garbage. The tire, toy horse, the shoe, the elbowpad, and the Janitor were either free or commercial models; everything else was modeled by me. The styrofoam containers, cardboard boxes, and the fork were modeled in Wings 3D and converted to mesh2 format using PoseRay. Everything else is CSG. A few of the items (namely the cosmetic bottles in the open box) were originally modeled for "Opposites." The shovel handle is from The Hottub (I have yet to actually model the scoop part!).
In hindsight, I would probably have modeled more of the garbage in Wings because it's easier to translate and rotate the objects visually. Doing that with CSG objects involves a lot of trial and error. Fortunately, it only has to "look good" from the camera's perspective. Alternate perspectives show collisions between objects.
This sample scene shows some background objects (spotlights and exit sign) that got cropped out of the final version.
The works of art in the background: The three striped image I call "Whisper of Fire" - a small version of "Voice of Fire," for which the National Gallery paid $1.76 million in 1990. The exclamation print is not based on any work that I know, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a work existed. A museum would probably have spent thousands of millions of dollars on it.
The Janitor's cart is all CSG-based. The spray bottles are prisms, the scrub brush bristles are hundreds of cylinders. The garbage bag is just a hollowed out round box with a normal of a photograph of the same kind of bag used to give the creases.
The "My Junkyard" sign was added shortly before the deadline. I'm not entirely happy with it, but the composition needed something to balance the janitor. Perhaps it makes the image literally "from rubbage bin to junkyard." The lights and radiosity aren't quite right, but I ran out of time to get them just so. Another (quite literally) last minute decision was a title for the image!
Finite objects: 26186
Infinite objects: 1
Light sources: 5
Total: 26192
Render Statistics
Image Resolution 1024 x 768
Pixels: 798065 Samples: 1550161 Smpls/Pxl: 1.94
Rays: 47561016 Saved: 6027755 Max Level: 25/30
Ray->Shape Intersection Tests Succeeded Percentage
Bicubic Patch 67386796 8797947 13.06
Box 1240502667 379635420 30.60
Cone/Cylinder 2182038554 96734393 4.43
CSG Intersection 207738790 30004207 14.44
CSG Merge 81668059 17554454 21.49
CSG Union 63847151 13588960 21.28
Mesh 257263574 74457735 28.94
Plane 850949010 805805065 94.69
Prism 1009719 403779 39.99
Prism Bound 33817669 24126503 71.34
Sphere 1107130286 12709471 1.15
Sphere Sweep 2978033 326946 10.98
Torus 312458754 49899676 15.97
Torus Bound 312458754 59279488 18.97
Triangle 6136284 1171863 19.10
Bounding Object 9194 1955 21.26
Clipping Object 8237180 5136603 62.36
Bounding Box 52944106827 15848755310 29.93
Light Buffer 970480470 355541287 36.64
Vista Buffer 108790065 79012537 72.63
Function VM calls: 9
Roots tested: 62674780 eliminated: 3708305
Calls to Noise: 19172421 Calls to DNoise: 51934649
Shadow Ray Tests: 947308633 Succeeded: 409418280
Reflected Rays: 10726383
Transmitted Rays: 13974158
Radiosity samples calculated: 329187 (1.13 %)
Radiosity samples reused: 28774078
Samples (final trace) 284695
Samples (recursion 1) 236138
Samples (recursion 2) 93049
Smallest Alloc: 18 bytes
Largest Alloc: 48000016 bytes
Peak memory used: 553910917 bytes
food3.jpg
Total Scene Processing Times
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 55 seconds (55 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0 seconds)
Cloth Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0 seconds)
Mechsim Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0 seconds)
Render Time: 2 hours 18 minutes 13 seconds (8293 seconds)
Postpr. Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0 seconds)
Total Time: 2 hours 19 minutes 8 seconds (8348 seconds)
CPU time used: kernel 12.83 seconds, user 8332.45 seconds, total 8345.28 seconds
Render averaged 94.24 PPS over 786432 pixels