EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk NAME: Peter Murray TOPIC: Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Musings WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ COUNTRY: England RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02a.f1 Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: Aerial photos book English village book Deskdraw, Photoshop and a Wacom tablet to draw the heightfield and imagemap Poser to render the human figure Graphic Converter to convert the results to gif RENDER TIME: 0 hours 9 minutes 11.0 seconds (551 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Apple Power Macintosh G3 510 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A man sits with a picnic basket where he's had some good picnics, some good memories, in the past, and remembers those other occasions. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Usually, I seem to spend most of the time for an entry on the central objects, and leave the setting until it's almost too late. This time, for some reason, I built the setting first and left the central objects until the last two days! One day I'll get more organised. I had this mental image of a lake in front of hills/mountains, and drew a heightfield for that. The actual scenery uses two copies of the heightfield; one for the extremes of height and depth, and one to provide the grass surface with a hole for the lake. The trees were copied from photos in some books; I intentionally didn't want to use Sonya Roberts' include file, but to make some more impressionistic trees of my own. I should probably have used a blob object for the foliage though. I tried using anti-aliasing. That took a lot longer to render, and the texture for the trees' foliage was destroyed by it, so I haven't used it in the final scene. The picnic basket is modelled on one I've got, though the texture on the lid, and the internal texture never worked out the way I wanted them to. Given its size in the final image, that doesn't really matter. Since you can't currently wrap an imagemap around a Poser figure once it's been imported to POV as triangles, I thought about how I was going to colour it as I wanted, and finally decided to take the Poser rendering and apply it as a transparent imagemap, as a sort of cardboard cutout :-) . Apparently, the background which looked white in Poser was actually a pale grey; at least, I assume that's why the box is visible :-( . What else? Oh yes, I used fog for the first time to make the hills look more distant. The fog has also washed out the sky sphere I used :-( . Oh, and the rippled transparent texture for the lake was commented out in test renderings, and I forgot to put it back in! I should have used an #if to comment it out instead :-( . And I like my new computer, which rendered and rerendered this image several times at 800x600 on the deadline day much faster than my old computer could have rendered a small preview size :-) .