TITLE: Leafcutters
NAME: Angelo Colucci
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: angelo@evolve.co.uk
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cutters.jpg
ZIPFILE: cutters.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.01 and sPatch 1.51

RENDER TIME: 
    6.5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Leafcutter ants foraging.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Moray's duplicate feature was heavily used for making this image. 

The ants (or rather ant, the rest are duplicates) use SPatch modelled beziers
for the
abdomen, thorax and mandibles. The head is just the abdomen shape duplicated and

scaled down. The legs and antennae are a mixture of spheres and cylinders.
They're 
probably more complicated than they need to be considering their use in the
final
image.

The branch, tree trunks and pointy leaves all started life as bezier cylinders.
The
add noise feature of SPatch was used to make the tree trunks more interesting.

The bits of leaves the ants are carrying are translational sweeps although I
guess
a simple bezier patch would have sufficed. The texture uses a quilt colormap
and
normal to give the veined appearance.

The leaves in the background are based on a single simple oval leaf shape which
was
duplicated and put into a whorl of 5. This was then scaled, rotated and
duplicated
several times to create the mass of leaves. A small bozo normal makes the
highlights
a little more interesting.

After this stage I thought the image needed a splash of colour so I set to work
on
the flowers. The anther bit in the middle is *way* more complex than needs be,
but
it was fun to model :-)

I used a focal blur to hide some of the detail in the background to make the
ants
stand out more.