TITLE: Rocket Man
NAME: Chris Hernandez
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cbh_iw.jpg
ZIPFILE: cbh_iw.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.02 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Adobe Photoshop v4.0, Tree Designer, Canon Scanner

RENDER TIME: 
    7hrs 2mins


HARDWARE USED: 


   - Pentium II 266 with 64 meg ram



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


   "Commander Ace McCool, this is Earth Base One. the Zornid Brain
    Changers are attacking us. Our defenses are down; we need help!
    Only you can save us...."

    With his Atomic Discombobulator in hand, Ace McCool (member of
    the elite Universe Protection Unit) steps toward his trusty
    spaceship, Condor 5. With a grim sigh, he prepares for launch,
    and accepts his duty. Looks like he has to save the world...
    again.
    



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


    The bulk of this image was done with CSG. The only modellers used
    was were sPatch for the towel and Tree Designer for the tree (duh!).

    The cape is made up of two layers of bezier patches. The texture of
    the inside layer is based on a scan of a real towel. I blended this
    with a POV color_map to get some consistency on the texture since I was
    having trouble keeping the contrast down on the scan. The normal is
    also based on the scan, but blended (using average) with some bozo and
    a turbulent x-gradient/sine wave to get some noise and wrinkles in.
    Unfortunately most of the detail in the texture was lost in the focal
    blurring and I didn't have time to tweak it.

    The tree was created in 2 seperate parts as well. There is one model
    which makes up the main body of the tree (including leaves and branches)
    and another for the roots. I seperated the two in order to make scaling
    and tweaking of each easier.

    All other elements (the houses, fence, treehouse, boy, etc) were created
    by hand using CSG. Since the modelling of the arms and gloves were very
    fiddly, I cheated by modelling only the left arm and rotating it 180
    degrees to be used as the right one - making sure that the fingers and
    hand were covered up by towel. I used the same trick with the shoes -
    modelling them without any leftness/rightness (for lack of a better term)
    so that they could be used on both legs.

    The other 2 trees in the background are flat GIFs image_mapped onto
    boxes.

    You may not notice, but the room visible through the window is also
    detailed with a desk lamp and a shelf. I had wanted to add some books to
    the shelf but that got chopped due to time constraints. I also had to
    give up doing some dandilion type vegetation that I wanted to add to the
    grass to break up the ground a little it more.

    I wrote an include file for the grass. This file creates a 1x1 square
    covered with many randomly rotated and positioned grass blades. At
    first I used a bezier patch as the basic grass blade, but this ended
    up using too much memory. I ended using some CSG cylinders to construct
    the blades in the final version.

    Since the number of blades had to be cranked up to get a convincing
    patch of grass, I ended up using patches of different resolutions. The
    patches of grass close to camera were full resolution (3 patches of about
    2600 blades each), and subsequent rows away from the camera contained
    lower and lower numbers of grass blades. Even so, this render ended up
    taking about 170 Mb of memory, so I found my system continously thrashing
    out to disk when rendering.

    I had planned the scene to be in bright daylight from the start,
    thinking that it would be easy to light. I found I was wrong. I had to
    spend a lot of time fiddling with the lighting setup and getting the
    balance between the key and fill lights right. I'm actually still not
    happy with the lighting - I think the shadows are too soft. BUT when
    I found it looked even funnier with sharp shadows. <sigh> If only I had
    more time....

    As usual, I was under a bit of time pressure, so my code is close to
    unintelligible. I will be happy to get email from anyone if they want
    help making sense of it.
    




