TITLE: Loneliness of the Unwanted
NAME: Ron Gow
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rgow@calweb.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

JPGFILE: lotu_rg.jpg

RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 5

TOOLS USED: 
    Bryce 5, HamaPatch, Lsystem4
    Paintshop Pro 7 used for textures and to add signature and convert to .jpg

RENDER TIME: 
    5 hr, 37min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium IV 1.8gz



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I first saw the topic I immediately thought of the Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby".  I was caught by the line "Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name". I kept seeing a headstone with no name on it, but couldn't think of what to do with it.  However, when I saw the article in the paper the next morning about a newborn baby found in a trash dumpster, and realized it.was the third one in three weeks, I knew I had my topic for this round.  I could think of nothing lonelier than being born to be abandoned. Never loved, not even named.  Unwanted.  Thrown away.  That's loneliness.  Hence center stage for Baby Doe.

For the rest of us, loneliness usually stems from loss or absence. Behind Baby Doe I represent several types of loss:
1. Loss of a parent.  A loss we all share, yet completely different for each of us.  In memory of my father Merle, and dedicated to all the rest of my family.

2. Loss of a spouse.  Losing the person you've devoted your life to leaves a yawning chasm in the heart.  In memory of Elizabeth Renner, dedicated to her husband Alan and daughter Renee.

3. Loss of a child.  The loss that should never happen, the passing of a child before their parent.  In memory of Mark Blair, and dedicated to his mother Roberta.

4. Collective loss.  When senseless violence shatters lives and families around the world.  In memory of September 11, 2001, and dedicated to all the survivors.

And the hidden guest:  (Not visible, behind the fence (which has no gate)), representing the loneliness of self exile, a reclusive millionaire with the intials H.H.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

WHEW!  This was by far the largest scene I have ever attempted [488 objects - 4.38 million polygons].  If nothing else, I learned a lot about working with large files.

I already knew I wanted the closeup of the headstone in the foreground, and that meant GRASS, which I didn't have a good way to do at the time.  I had been using a hi-res heightfield made of 3000 spikes, but it didn't look good up close, and was only good for little patches since the polygon count was ridiculously high.

I also had wandered around the local cemetery looking at stones, but realized the stones were the easy part... cemeteries are seriously full of plants!  

So I spent the next 3 days fiddling with Tim Perz's excellent Lsystem4 until I had several vines, ferns, and weeds I was happy with, and in the process accidentally came up with a long thin polygon shape that looked suspiciously like a blade of grass. A few more hours of fiddling and EUREKA! - I had got it to make nice versatile patches of lovely grass that had only about a 20th of the polygons (YES! - OH JOY OH BLISS - I FINALLY GOT GRASS!!!  I was so thrilled I almost named the picture "grass".)

Each major part of the picture was done first as a separate scene.  I had a scene for each stone, and one for the stonewall, and one for the fence.

The stones are all either modeled in HamaPatch or Bryce or are a combination of both.  The plaques and lettering are CSG using Bryce symetrical lattices.  The fence and wall are CSG.  The long bladed plants and the ivy on the wall were done in Hamapatch. All vines, bushes, ferns and The Grass were done in Lsystem4.  The background trees are a mix of Bryce and Lsystem4.  (The Bryce trees are nice looking, but the Lsystem trees are more natural in my opinion. Mixing them gives me a nice natural looking variety pak)

Materials are either Bryce procedural textures or my own maps created in PSP7.

Once I had each part looking like I wanted, I merged them all together into the final scene and started to work on lighting.  After several variations I didn't like, I tried a render with volumetric lighting and it looked much more natural, but made the picture a lot brighter and played havoc with several of my plant textures.  I spent about a week tweaking my textures to get them all to blend again, and dropping the ambience levels to decrease the brightness and finally get the final version that's here. I think it looks pretty natural for an outdoor scene.


No source file, its 193 meg.