TITLE: The Lilypond NAME: Maurizio Tomasi COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78 TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mtlily.jpg ZIPFILE: mtlily.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Linux TOOLS USED: - Red Hat Linux 7.3, kernel 2.4.18 with KDE 3.0.0 - Emacs 21.2.1 in POV-mode - The Gimp 1.2.3 - HeightField Lab 0.90 Beta - Gilles Tran's MakeTree macro RENDER TIME: Time For Parse: 0 hours 7 minutes 1.0 seconds (421 seconds) Time For Trace: 2 hours 14 minutes 45.0 seconds (8007 seconds) Total Time: 2 hours 20 minutes 28.0 seconds (8428 seconds) HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time (before 1930s), ponds were quite common in the Po valley (Northern Italy). At that time it was possible to observe the starred sky in a beautiful and peaceful landscape without being disturbed by the city lights, not yet as bright as today. This scene takes place a bit after the sunset, when the moon is throwing shades of gray on the Earth and still faint shades of orange appears at the horizon. This is not a majestic image, but I think it suites well the topic: my opinion is that a landscape has not to be necessarily solemn in order to be "spectacular" and "stunning". I hope you agree with me. You could have some problems in seeing the image because it is quite dark: if so, adjust the brightness of your monitor. I already increased a bit the brightness with The GIMP in order to see the details on the monitor I am using at the University (the original image is in the zip file, mtlily-original.jpg). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First, a bit of history. I must admit the topic was not very interesting for me. It is a bit too much "precise" in defining the subject and does not offer many ways to be original, so at first I thought not to participate to the IRTC. But a month ago I found some beautiful photos I took during a trip in the Alps last year. A waterfall with a small pond near it caught my attention, and I decided to create a ray-traced image of it: this would have been a good starting point for a IRTC submission! But the task was not so simple: I discovered that creating a realistic waterfall is a *real* pain. So I switched to a bunch of waterlilies in a pond. My first idea was to create an impressionistic picture by placing a transparent mirror with some bumps on it in front of the camera: with some experiments I hoped to get a good imitation of Monet's painting style. But after about 50% of the image was done, I found that somebody else used the same technique in the old "Gardens" round of IRTC! (sorry, I have forgotten the name). Since I already created the waterlilies, I decided not to completely change the topic of the image and started modeling the current scene. At first I thought to use a foggy weather (I do not like bright images very much...), but after having rendered some test images I found that a soft moonlight would have given a more impressive effect. The most difficult issue was to choose the right set of colors: landscapes under the moonlight are made almost completely by shades of gray. The actual result has perhaps too much colors, but I did not want gray waterlilies! (an "artistic" alternative would have been to create a grayscale image with the waterlilies being the only colored things, but this would have been a bit off topic because of the lack of realism...) The waterlilies are simple CSG objects made with intersecting spheres. The leaves under them are height field objects based on a image (lily-leaf.png) I created with The GIMP (using the "smudge" tool and a lot of Gaussian blur). The land is an height field made with HeightField Lab 0.90 and the aid of The GIMP to create the pond depression (see make-hf.scr file). The grass and the reeds are sphere-sweep objects created with the same macro. The color shades and the mean height are determined by two height field, grass-color.png and grass-height.png (created with HeightField Lab; see the TraceGrass macro in grass.inc for details). Trees are created by running createwillow.pov; this uses the excellent Gilles Tran's MakeTree macro to create three different trees (actually they do not resemble real willows...). I tried to write a macro for creating weeping willows by using a lot of small spheres, but the result was unmanageable because of memory requirements: a barely acceptable willows came out from 115,000 spheres! A week ago I resigned and switched to Gilles' macro: now the whole image with five trees is made by only 75,000 objects (and most of them are grass blades!), although they do not look like willows. The barks are texture maps with a bump map created from the same texture with the aid of the "emboss" filter (The GIMP). Ok, within this size it is hardly noticeable, but when I rendered close-ups of the trees, it gave a very good effect. The water is a simple isosurface. Note that a `USE_QUICK_WATER' variable is commented in lilypond.pov: by uncommenting it the water will be a box with bozo normals (quicker rendering, and probaby the same quality). In order to improve a bit the light fade under the water, I added a black fog under the water level. This adds some good detail to the image. The sky is a sky sphere with three layered textures. A vertical gradient from orange (at the horizon) to black (at the zenith) suggests the sunset. The second texture is a starry texture (a modification of one of the textures provided in stars.inc, with less colored stars). Finally, a bozo pink texture suggests faint clouds illuminated by the last shades of the sun. For the final rendering, I used an adaptive recursive anti-aliasing with a very low threshold value (0.05) and a recursion limit of 2 steps, in order to get a very smooth image. The included zip file contains every file I used to create the image. There is also a Makefile (GNU Make) which *should* let you to re-create the image. If you encounter problems, fell free to contact me via e-mail. Maurizio Tomasi