TITLE: Monet's Garden in Giverny NAME: David Morgan-Mar COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/povray/ TOPIC: Gardens COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dmmonet.jpg ZIPFILE: dmmonet.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (jpeg conversion) Pen and paper to record modelling dimensions and turbulence parameters RENDER TIME: 31 minutes, 56 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Claude Monet was one of the leading lights in the impressionist movement which swept European art in the closing years of the nineteenth century. He spent his latter years living in a villa in the small town of Giverny, not far from Paris. There he perfected his artistic style, painting many beautiful pictures of his equally beautiful gardens. This image show the famous gardens at Giverny as Monet saw them. Paths lead through beds of irises in the foreground. Groups of roses occupy another flowerbed at the left. Reaching above, majestic trees filter the sunlight of the Paris countryside and reveal glimpses of gates and buildings in the background. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Ever since I began using POV-Ray, I had wanted to do something leaning much more in the direction of the traditional visual arts than the usual mathematical modelling and accurate 3-D simulation. The topic for this round gave me the perfect opportunity. Gardens have been a subject for painters for centuries, and who better to try to emulate than the person who has painted arguably the most famous garden pictures ever? For inspiration I studied many of Monet's works. Initially I was drawn to his famous water lilies series of paintings, which really show the maturity of impressionism late in Monet's life. A bit of experimentation revealed this apparently simple goal contained more technical and modelling difficulties than I had first thought. I turned instead to what at first appears to be a more complex scene, but which has fewer technical problems than trying to simulate lilies floating on the reflection of a fairly complex sky in a water surface. The image is based on a painting of the artist's garden painted by Monet in 1900. The modelling is really quite simple, since the blurring effect added to the scene to give an impressionist style hides much of the modelling detail. Macros define the irises, roses and trees, and each is placed many times at random in the appropriate places. I used fairly bright lighting and a high ambient level to mimic Monet's bright colours. The trickiest part was getting the impressionist blurring right. I experimented early on with placing a thin refractive sheet with a bumpy normal between the camera and the scene, and focal blur. Eventually I found that just a camera normal with appropriate texture worked fairly well. Exhaustive trial and error tuning once the scene had been modelled gave the final effect. I think I did about 30 complete renders with different combinations of normal patterns, scalings and turbulence parameters to get it looking right. The end result looks gratifyingly more like an oil painting than a raytracing, in my opinion. I considered using the JPEG compression required to produce the submitted image to cause or enhance part of the blurring effect I wanted, but quickly dismissed this idea as against the spirit of the rules. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the final bitmap image has quite a bit of small scale detail which is lost or blurred in order to squeeze the JPEG file under the 250k limit. I have included a PNG format image in the zip file, which shows what the image really should look like without any JPEG compression. The full POV-Ray source code is also included.