TITLE: Starting a Family
NAME: Michael Hough
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/amaltheaj5
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bluejay.jpg
ZIPFILE: bluejay.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows, sPatch, Paint Shop Pro 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    Around 5 hours 30 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 233 64 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Deep in an evergreen forest, a blue jay adds onto her nest as her mate keeps a
look out for possible danger.  The nest is contructed of twigs and roots, then
lined with grass and feathers.  There will be five new mouths to feed if all
goes well.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The orginal idea for this image really flew right by me; A blue jay that is. 
They really are pretty birds.  So I set about creating one in sPatch as my
first real project in the program. 

 The modelling for the body and head of the bird was pretty easy and went by
pretty quick.  The problem was that I had a good looking crow, but it wouldn't
pass as a blue jay.  I had tried pulling some of the points away from the head
for the crest.  This didn't look right, so I created a new layer and created a
seperate group of patches with more points so I would get a little more control
over it.  I did the same thing with the wings, legs, feet, and tail.  All
together there is about 6 layers in the sPatch file.

One thing worth noting is that I only used 4 point patches in sPatch.  This made
things go a lot slower and required planning, but the end result was a much
smoother model than I could have done by including 3 point patches.  All the
parts were exported as seperate pov files, which I used like one would use
include files.    I removed the lighting, cameras, textures, and #declared each
one with a name (ie. wings).  

I used an image_map for each of the 'parts', which I created by projecting a
numbered grid created in PSP onto the model in POV-Ray.  I used a planar
mapping because none of the other map types created a good distrubution of the
grid.  Then I painted on the grid so that the placements of the colors matched
up to where I wanted them on the model.  This took a lot of jumping back and
forth from PSP to POV...when those were done, I created a 2 color material_map
to get the shine on the beak.  I used the images as bump maps for some of the
parts.  This added some nice highlights to the wings in particular.  Other than
the jays and the two feathers in the nest (also created in sPatch), I used
procedurals for the rest of the scene.

The only two parts of the Jay that aren't patches are the eyes and eyelids.  The
eyes are spheres and the eyelids are tori.  I lined them up by checking the
position against the grid in sPatch (plus a little trial and error).  I used
the grids in sPatch for a lot of the aligning, especially the nest to the jay's
feet.  

The nest is a psuedo-fractal 'twig' object that was spun around with a few while
loops that include about three parts that are put together.  The same method
for the twig was used for the dead branches that the nest and jays are on (also
the twig in one of the jay's beak).  It took a lot of fiddling with the rand
amounts and the directions (had to use a lot of #ifs to change the direction
where I wanted it to).  

The eggs were created in sPatch as well.  I used the point curvature
manipulation tool to get the one end of the egg narrower than the other.  The
texture is a bozo pigment with an appropriate finish and very little crackle
normal.  They were placed in the nest with a little trial and error.  The
feathers were moved and rotated so one looks like it is resting on the nest and
the other was built into the nest.  The gaps in the nest were filled using a
cone to which I applied a somewhat 'fuzzy' texture to get the look of downy
feathers lining it.

The two branches of evergreen are something I got as a gift from someone on aol.
 I showed him an early version of the scene and mentioned I wanted to make some
evergreen branches and he sent the file to me.  They are composed of needles
that are thin (scaled) spheres and duplicated a few times and declared.  Then
they are reused in the same manner to build up the branches.  I changed the
colors and made the needles a little longer, but not much else, since it was
very good to start with (thanks Dave).

The ground is a height field that was scaled very flat and a texture_map was
applied to it.  Then a 'sun' light was created and I made two planes with
varied transparency to get the effect of the light through the trees.  A ground
fog and a touch of focal blur finish off the scene.  A little trivia:  without
the focal blur or fog, the scene actually takes longer to parse then it does to
render.  I think I did a good job of managing the complexity of the scene
considering the size of the file and all the things going on in it.

...and so ends my long scene description.  I included all the source this round,
though I've reduced the size of the images for the image maps and converted
them to jpeg so as to lot to save space.  

-Mike