TITLE: The lonely (but happy) bush
NAME: Christoph Gerber
COUNTRY: Switzerland
EMAIL: ni.chri@bluewin.ch
WEBPAGE: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Y&Artist=gerberc
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lbush.jpg
ZIPFILE: lbush.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Megapov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    Forester, Leveller, Poser, PhotoShop (for painting the crack in the
main rock and jpg conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    approx. 12 h

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.7 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I made this scene after the June photo of the landscape calendar I currently
have in my
office. The main rock with the crack in the foreground turned out quite
accurate. The 
crack must be quite old because it shows smooth, washed out edges. In the
original photo
there is a Scott's Pine growing out of the crack. Because I was not able to find
or make
any decent looking model of a Scott's Pine I replaced it with a bush.

The scene shows that loneliness doesn't allways need to be a bad thing. Although
the bush 
is the only plant growing out of a crack in the middle of a huge rock his
position allows
him to overlook the whole valley. In fact he is all green and growing and
obivously feeling
quite comfortable with his situation.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The height field for the main rock was made in 3 steps: first I rendered a rock
similar to
the other ones present in the secene with a y-gradient from black to white and
the camera
looking down the y-axis. Then I painted a white crack on black background in
PhotoShop. 
Finally the crack hf was subtracted from the rock hf in Leveller.

The bush was made with Gill Tran's maketree include file and the code for the
clouds is 
based on stsky.inc by Jaime Vives Piqueres. The trees are made with Forester
Arboretrum
by Stephen Dartnall. If you are interested you can find it at
http://www.dartnall.f9.co.uk/.
The lizard is a poser model made by Nigel Pickering.

A big thank you goes to the people from news.povray.org for their valuable
comments on the 
WIP versions of this scene. In fact, I started this scene without the intention
of submitting
it to the IRTC but decided to do so after some encouraging comments.