TITLE: Marching Piggies
NAME: Karl J. Anders
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: karl.anders@web.de
TOPIC: Music
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kja_pigs.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov v1.2


TOOLS USED: 

- HarmonyAssistant V9.1.9  to arrange "Piggies" and produce the (pict) image map
for the sheet
- GraphicConverter PPC V4.2.1 to convert the image map to png and to convert the
final picture to jpg


RENDER TIME: 
    5 min 25 sec


HARDWARE USED: 
    PowerMac G4 (350 MHz)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    "I'm so sorry daddy, I know I shouldn't leave my toys on your
desk. But YOU said you wanted to write music for a marching band just like
mine, so THEY wanted to have a look what you'd done so far, and the others just
popped up to keep them company and have a good time ..."

Pigs with spherical heads, cylindrical noses and drooping ears have been all
around me for quite a while. First there were drawings by my wife: as little
doodles, BirthdayCards, ChrismasGreetings, even our wedding announcement. Then
there were 4 musicians ( Flute, Clarinet, Drums and Bass) on screen painted
with something called DeluxePaint ( for the Amiga! mine is still running
occasionally ) and worked into a never-quite-finished program called "PigBand"
that only got published on a DiscMagazine of a north-german AmigaUserClub -
those were the days ... 
In 2002 I started to model those heads in PovRay as a BirthdaySurprise for my
wife. Last year there came bodies, arms, legs and clothing to demonstrate ideas
for a game we probably never will write. I dreamt of remaking something like
the old PigBand in 3D, but RealLife and other excuses got in the way until this
topic popped up. I just had to!! Because of the simpleness of the model I
always thought of them as little toys just a few centimetres high, so they are
not intended to be realistic pigs, more like LEGO(TM)- or
playmobil(TM)-figures. I thought of a string quartet or a rock band, but those
would have benn just "standing around". My daughter REALLY leaves her toys
everywhere (honestly: whose doesn't?), and a friend of mine and me just
recorded our own version of Harrison's "Piggies", and then a  marching band
passed by our house a week after my decision to compete - everything fell into
places, and here we are ;-)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


There was no modeler used, for several reasons: first, the best aren't available
for the Mac, or cost a fortune, and second, I used to be a C-programmer and
just love the SDL (and getting annoying commentaries for every forgotten
semi-colon ...;-)

Most of the Pig's body is geometrically very simple: spheres, half-spheres,
cones and cylinders scaled unevenly and a few tori. Most of the cones even come
from the Connect_Spheres()-macro. The head used to be a sphere and a relatively
small cylinder, but the ears were spheresweeps. This setup can still be seen on
the three pigs in the background, depicting my little family (wife holding the
cake, our daughter, and me); this group has been used before on birthday cards.
The "new" head consists of a 2-component blob (sphere and heavily scaled
cylinder), but the ears are just an intersection of an ellipsoid and a cylinder
- no fancy geometry anywhere.

The pig is fully posable. I had a hard time thinking of an acceptable interface,
the only example available to me being the old BlobMan with it's monstrous
array of angles to define the pose and extra variables to define textures ...
Then I found Jaap Frank's mini-tutorial on arrays ("ARRAYS: More possibilities
then the manual tells us",http://news.povray.org/povray.text.tutorials/, 15 jul
2003) and BINGO!
The interface to my PosablePig is modeled very close to Jaap's ideas: One
subarray contains 3d-vectors, giving body-dimensions, positions of hand and
feet, angles to rotate body or head, switches for gender, which-kind-of-ears
and such; one subarray contains textures for the skin and the clothing (
undefined textures lead to nonexisting parts of clothing: no shoe-texture
defined means no shoes to be modeled ! ), and the last array may contain extra
objects that have to be moved with the pig (or parts of it), like hats, caps
and wind instruments (connected to the head) or drums (connected to the body).
Anyone who would like to have a look at the (badly and bilingually commented)
code may email me and might get a copy ;-)

The musical instruments have been simplified as much as possible without loosing
recognisability; as they are thought to be part of small toys, there was no
reason (nor patience) to model every piece of pipe in a tuba or a trumpet or
the complicated mechanics of flutes and clarinets.

Most of the textures are just plain colors, except for the brass instruments and
the desk, but those come directly from POV's include files ( woods.inc,
metals.inc, golds.inc ).

Though I've been playing aroud with POV-Ray and MegaPOV for quite a while, I
consider myself far from being an experienced user. Modelling is still more fun
than realistic texturing and lighting - I think this can be seen from the
picture, and I fear it will remain like that for quite a while.

I do hope you think this picture worthy of a few seconds to look at, and please
excuse me if I wrote too much into this file - and any grammatical errors I
might have made.

Thank you for your time
KJA

