TITLE: WAFE NAME: Dan Connelly COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: djconnel@flash.net WEBPAGE: http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/ TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: wafe.jpg RENDERER USED: Vue d'Esprit 2.02 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 5.01, Thumbs Plus! RENDER TIME: 6hr7min HARDWARE USED: PII 266 MHz, 128 MB memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: see below DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: see below tools used detail: Vue d'Esprit 2.02 : rendering and modeling Paint Shop Pro 5 : signature Thumbs Plus! : JPEG conversion * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * NOTE : This is my second entry this round. As has been * * often discussed on the mailing lists, dual entries are * * neither disallowed by the rules nor discouraged by the * * promoters. However, if you wish to apply punitive * * scoring for what you interpret as a violation of your * * personal version of the rules, please apply that * * penalty to this image, rather than my other one, as * * this is the second of the two. * * thanks, Dan * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Motivation ---------- Vue d'Esprit 2.02 ( http://www.e-onsoftware.com/ ) is a new renderer packed with features for its FF600 price. It applies considerable enhancements to the excellent terrain rendering features of version 1.2, including object support. I normally wouldn't make two entries in a round, but I wanted to see this excellent package (a big improvement on Bryce 3D for terrains) got some exposure in the contest. Theme Notes ------------ Water, Air, Fire, Earth : the Four Elements.... A study in contrast.... The viewer, perched among a patch of tropical plants near the short, observes a tree growing impossibly on a rocky formation extending from a murky sea as it is enveloped in a mysterious flame. Billows of smoke fill the air, darkening the skies already obscured by ominous clouds. Overhead, an airship surveys the strange scene, safe from the flames below. Technical Notes --------------- The tree and plants were generated using Vue d'Esprit's internal vegetation generator. The flames and smoke were generated using "fuzzy textures", a version of POV interiors but with an excellent GUI that makes them much quicker to assemble and test. The terrain objects were created using the Vue height field generator. This is the best height field generator I've used (Leveler is the best editor). But the key to good terrains is texturing, and the hierarchical texture editor in Vue is much easier than Bryce's obscure texture format. The textures are modified from those supplied with the package. The sky is a modified form of one of those supplied with Vue. It is a two-level texture making extensive use of fractalized noise in color, transparency, and normal. Haze and fog were added, and the light characteristics were set to increase contract (hue and luminance) of the image. The airship is a mesh model supplied with the package.... Vue 2 supports DXF meshes, so there is no shortage of available models. The textures were customized for this image. The water was pretty much textured from scratch. But this is a fairly straightforward process.... none of the virtuosity of doing good POV water. The lighting is provided by the sun and two yellow point lights (shadow defocus set to 10 degrees) inside the flames. That's basically it -- substantial time was spent getting the fire & smoke to look good, and playing with textures, lighting, and composition. Vue 2.02 still has a few bugs which took a lot of work to minimize. Artistic Notes -------------- I focused on spatial balance and elemental contrast : foreground : plants -- life, a subset of Earth focus : a tree in flame on rocks the sea -- earth, fire, and air together. Life and death. Organic and inorganic. background : the sea, the short : earth meets water meets air. left : the expanse of the sea right : the perspective of the shoreline and the mist bottom : the Earth, the fire, the plants top : natural elements : the brooding clouds, the distant sun, the billowing smoke ... the last an intimate mixture of earth and air. synthetic elements : the airship -- steel, cloth, and air.. driven by fire, yet fire is its worst enemy, So everything here is placed and distributed to highlight the contrasts and the interactions between the Four Elements. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIXES ========== Rendering Settings ------------------ High quality annihilating (9x adaptive). Defocused reflections from the water. Defocused transmission near the flames. Soft shadows were specified for point lights. Camera Focus ------------- I could easily have rendered the foreground out of focus. Yet this is not to my taste. The reason is I view out of focus areas of the image as simulating photographs, imperfect, technologically limited reproductions of nature, rather than simulating nature itself. Healthy humans don't view near objects like the plant out of focus -- the eyes quickly adjust, and objects out of the focal plane are mostly ignored. If one then looks at the background, the eyes adjust again, and it comes into focus. The plants are no longer important. Thus I want my images to be the same -- you can see maximum detail at all depths. Simulating photography has its place. It just isn't my intent here. So the omission of defocusing is intentional -- my preference, my taste. Consider this -- if a digital camera was sold with pixel-by-pixel autofocus, delivering excellent clarity at all depths, would you use it? Raytracing gives us such a camera. I choose to to accept it. POV Note -------- Everything here could have been done in POV-Ray 3.1 with a good height field generator (gforge or leveller), although the slope and altitude dependencies of the textures would be difficult without patches such as those included in TMPOV (http://twysted.net). However, it would have presented a substantially greater challenge to achieve the same effect. Source Code ----------- Available upon request -- the files are too large to include here.