TITLE: Runaway Bride
NAME: Rob Fitzel
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: rfitzel@rogers.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: runaway.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    DAZ|Studio v1.3.0.1, PoseRay v3.8.18, Paint Shop Pro 8, Sanrope
ColorPicker PRO 3

RENDER TIME: 
    4h 29m

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD64 4800+ 3GB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The crowd turned to face the back of the church waiting for the beautiful bride
to appear and walk down the aisle. They waited...and waited...and waited. The
silence was broken by the groom's cell phone ringing in his breast pocket. The
audience turned around, their gaze fixed on Peter.

Peter's legs weakened, a wave of nausea flowed over him. He opened his phone,
certain of who the caller would be. Standing behind the chancel railing, he
felt like a guilty man in the prisoner's dock about to receive his sentence. He
slowly lifted the cell to his ear, unable to muster the strength to utter a
word. He stared at the back of the church, avoiding eye contact with his family
and friends.

He took a sharp breath when he heard the voice....that beautiful, delicate
voice.

His next words were a whisper that were only heard by his bestman.

"You can't? What do you mean you can't?"



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The church was inspired by a Google Images search. The church is built entirely
using CSG. The hanging lights use a emission-based media to "glow." My scenes
often end up zoomed in from where they started. As such, some of the details in
the church are not visible in this scene, namely the wainscoting and side
windows.  

The modeling in this scene is purposely simple; I decided to spend this round
focusing on textures and radiosity lighting (two of my weaker areas). 

There are 30 light sources (many of them area lights) which keep the shadows
soft, but slow down the rendering. Each candle has a small light_source to add
a glow to the wall behind. The candle flames are randomly scaled spheres.

There are 16 human models in this scene, all posed in DAZ|Studio, exported as
OBJ and converted to mesh2 using PoseRay. The human models come with high
resolution image_maps, which take up a huge amount of memory. 

Some solutions I came up with:
* share textures when the position or angle makes it hard to tell they are the
same (e.g., the groom's mother and bride's mother have the same face
* share textures when the face shapes are different, e.g., priest and last
groomsman (they also have different diffuse settings, giving them different
skin tones)
* replace some textures with simple pigments, e.g., the high res suit texture
was replaced with a pigment {rgb 0.1}
* create multiple instances of the same model (two men in the audience)

Despite these savings, the scene still took 2.45GB of memory.

The plants are XFrog-models from
http://web.inf.tu-dresden.de/ST2/cg/downloads/publicplants/ and were convered
to mesh2 with PoseRay. The hand-held bouquets are smaller versions of the new
guinea impatiens bouquets on either side of the scene. The boutonnieres are CSG
and look OK from a distance, but not as good close-up. It was a bit tedious to
position them just right on the mesh2-suits.

As this project unfolded, I became interested in the people & story behind the
picture, so I rendered a few more images of the ceremony at:
http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/wedding/wedding.html




