Artist: Jamie McCarter 50ve3gso@qstar.fanshawec.on.ca Filename: Jm-Dare.Jpg Quote: After the dare, Morton was never again seen in school. Rendering Time: On my 486dx2-66 with a region size of 86 Megs (mostly virtual memory) an anti-aliasing at 0.4 it took 4 hours 9 minutes to render. Programs Used: GUM, PoV-Ray, Blob Sculptor, Font3d Subject: For the April PoV Competition's `Food' subject. The worm is food, and soon the fish. Other Stuff: The idea has gone through a few changes until finally arriving at this final product. While sitting eating `food' I noticed the robins outside were chasing the worms. I drew some sketches of a possible scene from the point of view of the worms looking out their holes at the robins as they came looking for food. I wasn't pleased with what I had drawn so when I fed my fish and I noticed how gullible they were to anything that moved near the top of the aquarium, I changed my idea. The robins became fish and the worms, well they became dead worms on hooks. I thought of the quote in English class (supposedly I was reading King Lear), and the guy behind me (Ian) suggested I use the name Morton. I was used to modelling within Moray, but I had just received the registered version of GUM. So I figured I'd give it a try. I anticipated that learning a different modeller would pose many problems, but thankfully it didn't. Actually it solved a few that I would have had using Moray. =) I first created the bobber and hook as I figured it would be the easiest. Plus it allowed me to quickly asses the power of GUM. I created the mesh easily and quickly. However, while rendering all of what should have been torii became either cubes or just vanished. I was using PentPoV for speed so I changed back to the official PoV-Ray hoping it would solve the problem. It didn't. I was stumped for a couple days, until finally I re-read the torus section in the PoV docs. There I saw the section about using the `sturm' keyword if things didn't work. I added it to all my torii and voila. I had torii. Next I created the surface of the water and the terrain beneath. I used fog to simulate the opacity of water, however I was unpleased with the result. I wanted clear water for a while and then a sudden drop into darkness. So I faked the fog with an onion texture on both the surface of the water and the terrain. I then increased the distance on the fog to a much greater distance and it achieved the desired effect. For the ripples surrounding the bobber I knew they should diminish in size the further they extended. The standard ripples effect of PoV couldn't achieve this, so to overcome this obstacle I wrote a program (in QBasic) to output a sine wave in the form of a colour_map. I then used the sine colour_map as the base texture and overlaid it with another onion texture that grew darker the further out it went. This I rendered as a height_field and merged it with plane for the water surface. The worm I created in Blob Sculptor (for Windows) and I gave it a radial texture to further simulate the worm segments. I kinda guessed on the right colouring as I didn't want to go drown a worm. The fishermen around here tell me it looks good, so I guess I have a natural instinct to drowned worm textures. Yech. I then created the fish which I based loosely on the Disney style - with large eyes and eyebrows to express most of the feelings. I found it challenging to give them the proper facial expressions and positioning. Plus all the Disney characters are 2d, and creating one in 3d was a new challenge for me. Once I had created the eyes and eyebrows I used bezier patches (oh, I long for NURBS) to mould the body. I was used to the Moray method of Bezier modelling and I found GUM a bit different. Still, it worked fine and once I had connected all the bezier patches everything went as planned. One problem I ran into was in texturing. In PoV-Ray v2.2 it seems that one can't specify the number of times a image wraps around the cylinder, so I had to create the image_map with redundant pictures. The final image_map was something like 1100x100 rather than 100x100 because of this. I created the font using Font3d v1.49 (?) which was fairly easy. The back-bevel=off and back-face=off didn't work so I had to manually edit them out of the 13 Meg data file. I couldn't directly incorporate the text into GUM because of the size, so I created dummy declares which referenced my real declares. GUM continues to give me warnings, but it worked. I then attempted to export the scene, however ran out of room. So I purged a few games and gave the data file to PoV-Ray. After it finished rendering I had difficulties in uploading the image as the computer with the modem was being used. To make matters worse it was April 30th. To overcome this I frantically phoned all my friends with 14.4s. Thank you Jason Slaughter!