TITLE: Monet's Garden in Giverny
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/povray/
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmmonet.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmmonet.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 

  Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (jpeg conversion)
  Pen and paper to record modelling dimensions and turbulence parameters

RENDER TIME: 
    31 minutes, 56 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Claude Monet was one of the leading lights in the impressionist movement
which swept European art in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
He spent his latter years living in a villa in the small town of Giverny,
not far from Paris. There he perfected his artistic style, painting many
beautiful pictures of his equally beautiful gardens.

This image show the famous gardens at Giverny as Monet saw them. Paths
lead through beds of irises in the foreground. Groups of roses occupy
another flowerbed at the left. Reaching above, majestic trees filter the
sunlight of the Paris countryside and reveal glimpses of gates and
buildings in the background.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Ever since I began using POV-Ray, I had wanted to do something leaning
much more in the direction of the traditional visual arts than the usual
mathematical modelling and accurate 3-D simulation. The topic for this
round gave me the perfect opportunity. Gardens have been a subject for
painters for centuries, and who better to try to emulate than the person
who has painted arguably the most famous garden pictures ever?

For inspiration I studied many of Monet's works. Initially I was drawn
to his famous water lilies series of paintings, which really show the
maturity of impressionism late in Monet's life. A bit of experimentation
revealed this apparently simple goal contained more technical and
modelling difficulties than I had first thought. I turned instead to
what at first appears to be a more complex scene, but which has fewer
technical problems than trying to simulate lilies floating on the
reflection of a fairly complex sky in a water surface.

The image is based on a painting of the artist's garden painted by Monet
in 1900. The modelling is really quite simple, since the blurring effect
added to the scene to give an impressionist style hides much of the
modelling detail. Macros define the irises, roses and trees, and each is
placed many times at random in the appropriate places. I used fairly
bright lighting and a high ambient level to mimic Monet's bright colours.

The trickiest part was getting the impressionist blurring right. I
experimented early on with placing a thin refractive sheet with a bumpy
normal between the camera and the scene, and focal blur. Eventually I found
that just a camera normal with appropriate texture worked fairly well.
Exhaustive trial and error tuning once the scene had been modelled gave
the final effect. I think I did about 30 complete renders with different
combinations of normal patterns, scalings and turbulence parameters to get
it looking right. The end result looks gratifyingly more like an oil
painting than a raytracing, in my opinion.

I considered using the JPEG compression required to produce the submitted
image to cause or enhance part of the blurring effect I wanted, but
quickly dismissed this idea as against the spirit of the rules.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, the final bitmap image has quite a bit
of small scale detail which is lost or blurred in order to squeeze the
JPEG file under the 250k limit. I have included a PNG format image in the
zip file, which shows what the image really should look like without any
JPEG compression. The full POV-Ray source code is also included.

