TITLE: The Flight of Icarus NAME: Karl Manning COUNTRY: England EMAIL: karl@tgis.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.tgis.co.uk/home/manningk/web/firstpg.htm TOPIC: Flight COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: icarus.jpg ZIPFILE: icarus.zip RENDERER USED: POVRAY 2.2 (dos) TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro to convert to JPG. Graph paper, lots of scrappaper. Artist's wooden figure. Copy of "Gymnast" magazine RENDER TIME: 13hours 3 mins HARDWARE USED: 486 75mhz 16M ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Neither high nor low; but in the middle go." Icarus flys too high. The sun melts the wax holding his wings together and he crashes into the sea. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Lots of sketches were done for this picture. I chose this topic because I thought it would be quite challenging to create it. The sun is a wood texture scaled and put on the sky sphere. The people in this are created completely from scratch. I started with Daedalus. I used one of the jointed wooden artists figures to get the size and posture right. However, although I quickly produced something that looks like a wooden figure, it looked nothing like a real human ! Basically there were no muscle shapes or "fleshyness". I tried to draw the arm muscles and came up with some strange shapes (thats what comes from trying to draw yourself in a mirror !). I eventually found the pose that I wanted in a copy of the Gymnast magazine, where there was a male gymnast hanging on the rings. Next was a problem in generating the shapes I needed. I tried various scaled spheres. In the end I used bezier patches. There are 9 in total each calculated by hand and then mirrored to give the back of the arm. This allows me to use the same object and rotate it for the other arm. The heads are made from blobs. I have also been experimenting with using a height_field created from a photograph of a face. This gives some interesting mask-like images, but it takes a lot of work on the original picture to smooth the colours out and hence make a smooth skin. The toga is made from a number of half cylinders, planted with a little randomness to make it look less like a skirt ! The feathers are very thin stretched cylinders translated to give the wings. Icarus was based on Daedalus. The leg and arm joints were moved. Lining the toga up so that it fell over the legs and not through them took some time ! Each fold was hand tweaked. His wings had feathers removed and rotated "at random" ie I just picked numbers as I went. Position models in picture, add some extra feathers and some splashes and leave overnight to generate ! If you have any comments or want more information, please mail me. Karl Manning karl@tgis.co.uk 12/12/96