TITLE: Summer Blossom

NAME: Ian Shumsky
COUNTRY: UK

EMAIL: ianshumsky@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.outerarm.demon.co.uk/graphics/graphics.html

TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: isgarden.jpg
ZIPFILE: isgarden.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Nathan Kopp's POV MegaPatch 0.2


TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5 for heightfield creation and copyright text
            Photoshop 4 for JPEG conversion
            Poser 3 for cat object
            Thomas Baier's 3DS2Pov
            Keith Rule's Crossroads
            VC++5  to create several utility programs


RENDER TIME: 
    Time for Parse 1 hours 18 minutes 51 seconds (4731 seconds)
             Time for Trace: 4 hours 37 minutes 46 seconds (16666 seconds)
                 Total Time: 5 hours 56 minutes 37 second  (21397 seconds)


HARDWARE USED: 
    PII 300MHz, 64 Meg, 1 Gig swap, running Win95



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Late afternoon in a neat formal garden during summer...

The main reason to try this image was to see if I could create a
'striped' mown lawn effect, which I think I have managed to do. Once
this was done, the rest of the objects seemed to fit it... the paved
area, the sundial, the blossom resting on the grass, the cat
fascinated with the butterfly.

If I had more time (and skill) I would redo the cat and butterfly
objects, add a few plants to the image and adjust the lighting. The
zip file contains everything for the image apart from the cat and
butterfly mesh objects and their texture files. The heightfields in
the archive are reduced to keep the file size down.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


There are several components to the image.

Soil: You can't actually see much of it, but there is a heightfield
for the soil. This heightfield is made from 4 basic heightfields which
were derived from a single image. The heightfields are a mirror image,
a flip image and a mirrored flipped image. By creating a union of
these shapes, you can create a seamless heightfield.

Grass: The grass is based on Gilles Tran's grass macros. I have
modified them to have a different grass blade patch and have altered
the placement macro. There are 4 different 'patches' of grass, each
containing 2500 blades of grass. Within each patch, most of the blades
point in roughly the same direction. By having rows of patches which
are alternately rotated 0 or 180, you get the striped grass effect.
During the image construction I started hitting my PC memory limits,
so I had to convert my mesh objects into the mesh2 format supported by
the MegaPatch. This meant that I had to first get the grass creation
script to output the mesh to a file and then I had to write a simple
program to convert the mesh object into a mesh2 format object. The
same script was used to convert the gravel mesh object.

Sundial: The sundial is a CSG construction. There are two parts to the
item - the base and the actual dial. The base was created by making a
shape which matched the profile of the base, then differencing it from
each side of a simple box. The dial at the top is a genuine model of a
sundial (well, according to instructions found at
http://www.sundials.co.uk). There is quite a lot of detail to the dial
which unfortunately does not show up at 800x600.

Paved area: The bricks are superelipsoid objects which are
individually scaled, rotated and translated and placed within a
superelipsoid 'concrete'. As there is a scaled normal on these bricks,
I had to use the POV MegaPatch to correctly render them.

Gravel: Each piece of gravel (around the base of the sundial and
in-between the lawn and the paved area) is a simple mesh. All pieces
are randomly sclaed, rotated and coloured before being placed.

Blossom: There are about 150 blossom leaves distributed on the grass
area. The individual leaves are based on a single petal from Glenn
McCarter's rose model in his 'Drama of Cinema' image.

Plant Pots: The plant pots are simple CSG objects and the soil is a
heightfield. Trial and error helped position the plant pot which is on
its side.

Rake: The rake is another piece of CSG, and is based on one I should
use more to keep my garden tidy!

Cat: The cat is a Poser 3 model, positioned in Poser and converted by
Thomas Baier's 3DS2Pov conversion utility. The output from 3DS2Pov was
then modified to reference an image file containing the texture for
the animal. I think the cat is probably the worst component of the
scene.

Butterfly: The butterfly is originally one of the stock objects which
comes with Ray Dream 3D, exported as a .dfx file, converted to a .3ds
file by Keith Rule's Crossroads, then converted to a mesh2 object by
Thomas Baier's 3DS2Pov conversion utility. Simple procedural textures
were then applied. As with the cat figure, I think the butterfly lacks
a little *something*.

Lighting: There are two lights used in the scene. The main light
represents the sun. It is a large area light but quite distant. The
angle of the sun in the sky is about 0.5, so the size of the area
light reflects this. The second light is a 'filler' light positioned
at the same point as the camera. This second light adds a little depth
to the image.

