TITLE: A very oaky red
NAME: Daniel Hulme
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: povray@doublezero.uklinux.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.doublezero.uklinux.net/
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bonsai.jpg
ZIPFILE: bonsai.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5 on debian/sid

TOOLS USED: 
    povtree, tomtree, gvim, graph paper, pencil

RENDER TIME: 
    17 hours 17 minutes excluding photons, which I did in a previous
run

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 2800 (Barton core) with 1GB of RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

It's a tree in a glass. What more description do you want?
Well, really. This is my first raytraced image; I had the idea for it before the
start of the round, but was faffing about wondering what exactly to do. When
the topic was announced, my first thought was, "Wow, I could put this idea in.
What better example of epic proportions than two objects taken out of
proportion." Add to that the cheap joke about red wine often being described as
"oaky" and you have an image.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started off with the wine glass, which is a model of my physical wine glasses,
which are Polish lead crystal goblet-type things. I laid one on its side on top
of graph paper  underneath a light and traced its silhouette. This I translated
into a spline lathe - I used a Bezier because I couldn't get anything else to
give me the combination of continuity for the long curves and discontinuity at
the ridges.

The wine bottle is basically the measurements of a bottle of Pernod (which I
happenned to have handy) but with the slope into the neck a bit curvier. The
cork is just a cylinder: I was considering giving it text and changing its
shape to make it look more like it had been pulled from a wine bottle, but I
thought this would draw attention from the tree too much.

Lighting was supposed to suggest late night in Formal Hall. There is a dim,
setting Sun outside the window, and a candle just behind and to the right of
the viewer. There is also a ceiling light filling in the background of the
table.

You may already have noticed the reflection of the tree and another window on
the bottle. I got the idea for this in early testing, when I had a standard
sky_sphere. The tree was placed so that in the reflection it looked as if it
were outside. I thought this created a nice effect, so when I got rid of the
sky_sphere, I put in an invisible window to the right with a vague
grass/sky/cloud pigment going on.

The tree itself is courtesy of {pov,tom}tree. Finding some nice settings was
done by looking at lots of pictures of oak trees - google is your friend.
Rather disappointingly, the only thing oak trees seem to have in common is
their distinctive leaves, which you can't see the shape of in this picture, so
it could be pretty much any type of tree really.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the picture. I could go on tweaking lights and
colours for another two months (it took me a fortnight and a few bottles just
to stop the wine looking like fruit juice), but I don't think I could add
anything to the scene without ruining the image's simplicity and drawing the
eye away from the focus, which is how broken it is to have a tree in a wine
glass.