TITLE: Rustic Dawn
NAME: Isaac Kulka
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: isaackulka@juno.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cabin_ik.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 

Gilles Tran's MakeGrass Macro 
Corel Photo-paint 10 (for height-fields and jpeg conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    32 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1900+, 512MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A timeworn homestead abandoned to the open plains of North America.  

As this competition's topic was being announced I was already in the mind to
create something in a natural setting.  Since the topic was architecture I
decided to create a rural cabin otherwise isolated in an open natural
environment.  The rustic cabin, Though architecturally simple, is a good
candidate for this topic when shown how it may continue to stand for many long
years even after having been left vacant and left to weather the erosive
elements by itself.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The grassland surrounding the scene was created over a series of several steps.
First I designed a height-field using Corel Photo-paint to represent the basic
terrain for the scene.  Then I modified the MakeGrass macro so that it would
fit the grass to the terrain's HF. Later I modified it further so that by using
a second HF I could specify the density of the grass along the terrain, that
is: the darker a pixel is on the second HF the smaller and less dense the grass
will be at that location.  Next I set to work on the other plantlife, including
the tall stalks of grass, the gray sage plants, the magenta-colored buttercups
and some yellow daisy-like plants that are only noticeable in the distance off
to the left of the cabin.  Each of these were created using separate macros
running over recursive or linear loops placing leaves, branches and/or flowers
along a basic stem winding upward from one step in the loop to the next.

The basic structure of the cabin, including the walls, roof and shingles, was
accomplished through fairly straight-forward use of while-loops and CSG; for
the shingles I provided some additional random scaling and rotation to give
them a look of displacement to one another.

Surprisingly it was the texture, pigment and normal mapping for this scene that
received the greater part of my attention and was subject to the most
refinement and revision.  The sky was made by overlapping three layers of
pigment_maps, including one for the stars (faintly visible) one for the clouds
of the higher altitudes and one for the lower clouds, I'd also included a
ground-fog but later removed it because I felt it hid or obscured too much of
the scene.  The lichens covering the cabin were made using a color_map with a
granite pattern.  The normal_map for the cabin walls was made through a
combination of granite and agate normals.

Later I created the windmill for the background and also scattered some pebbles
on the dirt in the foreground.  I created the windmill through very simple CSG:
its blades are only instances of a single polygon object placed radically
around the center, most of the rest of it is made up of cylinders.  The pebbles
were randomly placed along a section of terrain near the camera.

Finally, I must thank everyone who has participated in the IRTC for providing so
many clever and inventive ideas about ray-tracing along with their images, if
not for these I should never have been able to make this.  Special thanks to
Gilles Tran for his outstanding MakeGrass macro:
http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm

