TITLE: A Rose for Emily
NAME: Charles H. Rousseau
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rousseauc@bellarmineprep.org
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: arzfrmle.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 5.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhino 2.0, Bryce 5.0

RENDER TIME: 
    11 34 12

HARDWARE USED: 
    PC

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The image of a Southern home, once so genteel but now somewhat shabby was the
principal setting of William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," a work
I first read as a high school student and have taught many times over the many
years since I tried to guess what was going on in that upstairs bedroom with
the light on.  The contest theme of decay at first suggested a lot of bones
among weeds and broken stones, but the more I thought about the word, the more
I came to sense the connotation of gradual transformation. In the pea soup of
Brycean fog my beautiful peeling paint and mold textures have been lost, but
the mood I was hoping to evoke was maintained just in time for Halloween 2003. 
The image will mean a great deal more to a viewer who is unfamiliar with the
story after they have read the final paragraph of Faulkner's work. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

A model of a window with shutters begun in Rhino 2.0 roughly a month ago grew
into a front porch with door and broken shutters and damaged railings which
looks now a bit too much like the porch of Boo Radley's house in "To Kill A
Mockingbird."  

My computer graphics students were assigned to make a 'haunted house' image for
Halloween and the extension of that project grew to a second story and a picket
fence.  The overgrown grass, so random in the Rhino model, was the largest
polygon mesh in the assembly and slowed the render time tremedously and the
Bryce light system cast a grid-like effect over the surface.  

Lost in the low Bryce fog, it now seems hardly worth the effort that went into
making it.  The new Bryce tree lab can take all the credit for the lovely moody
trees, although the controls took a lot of tweaking to get the droopy effect I
wanted.  I wish I could claim that the lighting effect in the upper window was
deliberate and a result of skill, but it is merely a lucky accident--the chance
placement of a volumetric spherical light and some random experimentation gave
me much more than I could ever have hoped for by deliberate effort.  

Unfortunately, Bryce has to be the absolutely slowest rendering software in the
universe, because with the heavy haze, fog and volumetric light, an image which
should have taken 15-30 minutes to complete stretched out to more than 11 hours
and made me begin to wonder if I would make the contest deadline.  Despite all
the fussing, I really like the way the final picture turned out.