TITLE: Des(s)ert         ( des_ert.jpg )


NAME: Ian McNamara
COUNTRY: United States

EMAIL: i-mcnamara@cornellcollege.edu
WEBPAGE: people.cornellcollege.edu/i-mcnamara  
        (Mostly photography at the moment, but when I become better with 
        Pov-ray, expect more generated images.) 


TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: des_ert.jpg
ZIPFILE: des_ert.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        Pov-Ray 3.6


TOOLS USED: 

        Pov-Ray 3.6, Photoshop, Canon G3 camera


RENDER TIME: 

        6h 11m 45s


HARDWARE USED: 

        Pentium 4 3.06 Ghz - 1024 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        In 2nd grade I learned the following "trick" to help me on an upcoming 
spelling test: "Remember, dessert has 2 S_s because you always want more."  
Ever since that fateful moment, desert and dessert have been linked in my mind. 

That might help to explain why I rendered this visual equivalent of a bad pun, 
the lowest of all forms of humor.  
        Whenever I hear the word "desert" I immediately think of an barren 
expanse of sand being heated relentlessly by a sun distorted by waves of heat. 

This imagery should help to serve as proof that I seriously lack imagination 
when it comes to deserts.  This image doesn't deserve to win this round, but 
I've been wanting to enter these competitions for some time now.  I might as 
well get started now and maybe someday I'll crawl my way to the top.  Thanks 
for taking a look at my entry. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started by creating the plate out of a simple lathe object.  By simple of 
course I mean that I spent about 2 hours re-reading the lathe tutorials and 
testing out countless combinations of points for the lathe before I got it 
right.  I guess that'll teach me for skipping over the tutorial when I first 
started using Pov-ray.

Next, I set out to create the sand/frosting.  The sand is an isosurface that 
uses a pigment function (ripple) to determine the height of the dunes.  
Another function is used to add the layering ripples to the side of the sand.

The dirt/cake itself is a horrendous mess of isosurfaces, intersections, and 
merges.  The holes are caused by a f_noise3d function, and the waves on the 
side are the result of another rippled isosurface.

The crumbs are spheres that are distorted by some more of that wonderful 
f_noise3d.  The first version of the crumbs that I wrote gave me very fake 
looking debris, so I'd like to thank Fabien Mosen for the Biscuit example 
included in the scenes folder. By examining his crumb coding, I was able to 
come up with a much better "crumb solution." (Too much f_noise on my part the 
first time around)

The cactus is the simplest object in the picture, and sadly enough it took 
almost as much time as the dirt.  I wanted to use an isosurface to create 
realistic cacti-like variations in the stems, but in the end I had to settle 
for simple CSG and a green wood pigment.  Oh well, maybe next time.

The textures were created in a variety of ways.  The wood is actually a 
photograph I took of my kitchen table (hence the camera under Tools Used). 
The dirt, sand, and setting sun were created with Photoshop.

Lastly, the scene is rendered using radiosity.  Almost all of the light is 
coming from a box above the cake with ambient value of 1.5, thought there are 
3 other light sources.  One is aimed at the cactus to cast a long (dramatic) 
shadow, the second is grouped with the sun in order to brighten it without 
artificially boosting its ambient value, and the third one is grouped with 
the dirt/cake object in order to show off its specular glow.