TITLE: Baseball NAME: Dan Connelly COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: djconnel@flash.net WEBPAGE: http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/ TOPIC: Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: baseball.jpg ZIPFILE: baseball.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay Windows 3.0 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 5.0, ThumbsPlus RENDER TIME: 59 minutes HARDWARE USED: PII 266 MHz, 64 MB memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: see below DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: see below tools used detail: POV-Ray : rendering and most of modeling Paint Shop Pro 5: scoreboard image map (not really visible) fence numbers baseball maps (see below) bat label signature ThumbsPlus: JPEG conversion sPatch: baseball cap (not shown) ====================================================================== NOTES theme notes: When I saw the topic, this image occurred to me immediately, so I decided to go ahead with it. As evidenced in such films as "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural", baseball has a special connection with nature among popular American sports. The dirt of the basepaths, the wood of the bat, the grass of the field -- baseball has elemental foundations far deeper than football (best described as a pseudo cyber-war), basketball (played on asphalt or indoors), and hockey (played on an artificial rink in formal contexts). As winter gives its first signs of relenting, that first day when the sun shines and the biting wind relents, it's "baseball weather" -- spring is on the way; life is good. technical notes: The bat is a cubic spline lathe object modeled and textured directly with POVRay. Dimensions were taken from an image at http://www.worthinc.com/ . The ball is based on an image from http://www.worthinc.com/ . Three versions of the baseball image were made : 1. a bright version for the "clean ball" 2. a browned version for the "dirty ball" 3. a grayscale rendering of the stitches only for the bump map. The dirty and clean ball images were combined using POV procedural texturing. The basepaths and outfield are a POV plane. The infield (and the overlapping portions of the dirt regions) are quartic polynomials of the normalized form: y = 16 (z + x) (1 - x - z) (z - x) (1 + x - z) which gives it a bit of a crown.... only 3 inches in the scene as rendered, but it makes a difference. Note this is actually generated using something of the form: y = 16 x (1 - x) z (1 - z) and rotated 45 degrees. The mound is a sphere. The bases and pitcher's plate are superquadratics. The home plate is manually laid out with triangles. Two versions of the fence are provided. A circular one is shown. Also provided is one modeled after the shape of the Ebbet's field fence -- square truncated with a straight segment in center field. The circular fence looked a bit better, so was used in the submitted image. Lettering is via Paint Shop Pro. The scoreboard uses an image map (Paint Shop Pro) and is otherwise constructed of boxes. Unfortunately the detail is lost -- it is just visible as a silhouette. The scoreboard and the foul poles were both given an optional blur to reduce antialiasing problems -- the pole was rendered as a 2x width 50% transparent white line, while the image map for the scoreboard was blurred in Paint Shop Pro (where it was generated). Note there is a screen next to the foul pole which is also rendered as a semitransparent object -- rendering each wire of the screen would be unreasonable. The sun, sky, grass, dirt, etc are all POV procedurally textured. The sky is loosely based on a version from "skies.inc", but is heavily modified. It uses 3 layered spheres and 1 ellipsoid, the former for clouds and the latter for the red-blue color. The sun is a disk with a transparency transition at the edge to simulate haze. It is rendered with an ambience of 2 to enhance its brightness in the haze. It was sized according to the following data, from http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2683/solsyshm.htm : mean distance from Earth : 150 Gm mean diameter : 1.392 Gm resulting angle subtended in sky : 0.530 degrees eccentricity of Earth orbit : 2.5 I oversized the sun by 3x (linear distance to point of 30% transparancy) from the above mean values due to atmospherics. It still looks small due to POV's wide field of view (120 deg default). All field dimensions are compliant with the official Major League baseball rules (see footnote) : http://www.majorleaguebaseball.com/library/rules.sml Lighting is provided from the Sun (infinite source) and a local light (second-order falloff) to the left of the scene. artistic notes: The image is designed to evoke the temptation to pick up the bat and hit the ball over the left field fence. The bat's focus is its handle, for example. The representation of objects was kept simple (for example, an spatch-generated cap included in the source code is not rendered) to avoid detracting from the natural aspects. The "stadium" was kept simple to enhance these -- the real grass, the dirt, and the sky, the sun. The minimal scoreboard is included to enhance the fact that this is not a modern major league park -- it is designed to be used, not watched. The experience of playing the game, and not the observation of the professional game, is the focus. --- footnote: I am not in strict compliance with the following from 1.04, as this would have increased the complexity of my field shape considerably : The degree of slope from a point 6 inches in front of the pitcher's plate to a point 6 feet toward home plate shall be 1 inch to 1 foot, and such degree of slope shall be uniform. ======================================================================= APPENDIX : source files scene.pov : the main scene file header.inc : dimensions and textures sky.inc : the sun and sky scoreboard.pov : the scoreboard defined (renderable) cap.pov : a baseball cap, not used in the final scene (renderable) sky_test.pov : a simple scene to test sky.inc final.ini : IRTC-grade rendering quickrender.ini: low-quality low-resolution rendering scene.ini : a working ini file for misc test renders baseball_bump2.gif : baseball bump map baseball_dirty2.gif : dirty baseball imagemap baseball_texture2.gif : clean baseball imagemap bat_label.png : label on bat fencenumbers_???.gif : numbering for fence scoreboard.png : image map for the scoreboard scoreboard_blurred.png : blurred version of previous cap_logo.png : logo for the cap