TITLE: Rainbow's End
NAME: Anne Gregory
COUNTRY: CANADA
EMAIL: albiaprime@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/agre108/crafts/sagewood.html
TOPIC: Garden
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rainbow.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, Plant Studio, Tree Designer,
            MS Paint, 3D Win, Paintshop Pro Demo

RENDER TIME: 
    14 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 160 Mhz, 40megsRAM; PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


After a long hard day, one wants to bleed off stress and relax. What
better way to do that then with a leisurely stroll through your favourite
garden.
A summer storm has cleared the air and the surroundings feel fresh and vibrant.

You stop to feed the squirels and birds and the sight of rainbow arching
through the sky fills your heart with joy.  Inspired by the splended sight you
wish the impossible, toss a coin into the well and turn for home.

Behind you there is a sudden blaze of light and you hear the tinkle 
of chimes behind you.  You turn at once and behold, you see......


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my first IRTC entry.  Same applies to my husband who assisted in
the final stages of completing this piece of artwork.  So for those who
are interested here is how we built "Rainbow's End".

I started with a landscape built in the Leveler Demo.  Then I used Moray 
to build the wishing well, sundial, park benchs, litter barrels and stone path.

Having established my garden's basic shape, it was time to create my plant
life.

The trees were contructed with Tree Designer and imported into Moray
as UDO's.  Plant Studio was used to create my flowers.  (to the writers
of this easy to use software my heartfelt thanks).

With my trees and plants ready for "planting", I turned to designing my 
garden layout.  This was done in Moray by placing a over 500 0.25 diameter
wide and 1.0 high red coloured cylinders to represent the locations of
plants and to ensure that I did not have something hanging in mid air.
It also enable test renders to occur in under 1 minute so that I could
make many changes in the hours I worked on this part of the project.

This Moray file was exported to POV Ray where I manually entered the 
details of the plants.  However, this technique had one major draw back.
Parsing and rendering time of the amended POV file ran to 6 hours per 
test image on my Pentium 160 and 2 hours on my husbands Pentium II.  

Something had to be done or I would be into my retirement years
before my garden was finished.

I explored the use of 3D Win which came with Moray.  First I exported
the Plant Studio files to *.dxf format and then used 3d Win to convert
them into Moray *.UDO and POV *.inc files.

Voila!  Rendering time fell to under 16 minutes per 800x600 test image and
I started planting my garden in earnest. The only draw back of this file
construction technique is that file loading time in Moray went through the
roof.  My old Pentium 160 just waved a white flag and surrendered.  After
waiting for over half an hour I just rebooted and borrowed my husband's
Pentium 2-350Mhz again.

With over 500 plant UDO's to install and calculate every time I opened 
Moray and loaded the Rainbow's End file, my husband and I decided to leave
it loaded and running 24 hours a day.  It takes about 15-20 minutes to load
this monster file, so leaving it up all the time was the only way to get
any work done.  This file needs LOTS of memory.

In the final stages of the project I added two "V" formations of Canada Geese,
(seen heading north at the top of the picture), the squirrels, the Monarch and
Ulysses butterflies and atop the arbor and well, the Bluebirds.  MS Paint was
used to generate the bit maps for the butterflies wings which my husband and I
both worked on. The squirrels and bluebirds are built from cylindrical beziers.

Finally I constructed the rainbow and the gold to fill the well and bucket. My
husband did the two stage grass for the lawn (we found a straight plain just 
didn't look natural), well as the "Please Don't Pick The Flowers" sign, who's
shape and colour sceme was inspired by the signs used in Canada's National
Parks.  The upper layer of grass is cubr 0.005 above the lower layer's cube.
Each of these cubes is in turn put in it's own group with the texture applied
to the group rather then the individual item, which causes the texture to be
applied finely and evenly over the whole surface.

The upper layer of grass is a modification of Moray's semi-transparent "Grass"
texture, using all shades of green.  The lower level is a modification of the 
Moray texture "Carribean Blue Sky", using all shades of green, and made non-
transparent.

To complete "Rainbow's End" I needed a sky that looked like a cloud front had
just past over.  This my husband built by creating a very large hollow sphere,
coloured sky blue, into which he inserted a Plain painted with Carribean
Sky one third down from the top of the sky sphere, re-scaled to produce the 
look of puffy clouds. 

The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with the Demo Version of Paint Shop
Pro I downloaded off the internet set to 6% compression to get the file down
under the IRTC maximum file size of 250kb,.
 
We Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright
                 "Rainbow's End" is 
Copyright(c)1999 Hugh & Anne Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.

