TITLE: emflgau
NAME: Emilio Matesanz
COUNTRY: SPAIN
EMAIL: matesanz@iponet.es
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: emflgau.jpg
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for Windows
TOOLS USED: Breeze Designer 2.0RENDERER TIME: 0h 57m 44s

HARDWARE USED: 486DX2IMAGE TITLE: Autumn flight

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

If you careful look at the fallen leaves in a sunny autumn day, you'll be
able to see, flying down, ...  :-)

In a less poetical way:
This image comes as a combination of the proposed topic and the season
when the creation starts. The main figure in the scene, the wooden model,
is a classic in raytraced images and easy to build and move with
good results.


HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

(Zip file with source povray code are not included because they are working
files, not very clean, really untidy, and still under construction.
Anyway these files are available for people interested.
Just email asking for them.)

I'm new in raytracing and I'm not sure about the right process
to follow in an image contruction, but I personally take care about
two main aspects: technical, and artistic.

Technical aspects: (how I made ...)
(All the objects in the scene have been created for this image)

   - Wooden model:
     The model has been worked by hand, with no modellers, using some
     basic shapes and CSG operations. The texture used is EMBWood1 included
     in the povray textures file. The texture has been rotated in different
     angles for each wood piece in order to get a less symmetrical look.
     Variables controlling movements for every joint have been placed in the
     scene code.

   - Leaves:
     The leave (indeed there is only one, rotated and translated
     in a random way) was modelled with the Breeze Designer as
     a Bezier patch. The texture has been done with a basic colour
     map with some transmitance and a normal modifier (wrinkles).
     Over this basic texture an image_map is added with the leaves
     ribs. This image is made fully transparent for the background
     colour, and some transparent for the other colours. The leave
     has been completed with a cone.

     - Wings:
     The only leave modelled is also used for the wooden man wings. The
     wings movements are linked to the arms. In order to get some movement
     impression in the wings, several transparent leaves has been added
     with some small displacements with respect to the "real" leaves.
     
     - Clouds an sun:
     Clouds are an emiting halo with a spherical colour map and a lot
     of turbulence. The container is a sphere asymmetrically scaled.
     An emiting halo spherically mapped placed behind the clouds has
     been used for the sun. One of the lights in the scene takes this shape.
     
     - Lights and atmosphere:
     Three point lights defined shadowless in order to avoid not desired
     shadows from the randomly placed objects (fallen leaves). Also this
     contributes to get a diffused atmosphere, together with the ground fog
     almost white and the plain SkyBlue background.


Artistic aspects: (Difficult to speak about)

Colours has been chosen to get some contrast with the blue background: from
yellow to orange and red. For leaves I have added some transparence, trying
to get soft colours in combination with the fog. The fog also gives depth
to the scene. The wooden model is the only object in the scene that looks
like a solid.

In the image composition I use mainly oblique lines, trying to get some
movement impression. The horizontal clouds fringe is placed for contrast.
The figure is placed almost in the center trying to attract the attention,
being the scene main focus got by the model head.


    I'll appreciate your comments on the scene and the resulting image.



Acknowledgements.- 
To the IRTC admin team for doing possible this
competition as a meeting point for amateurs raytracers.
Thanks to all the people who have programmed the Freeware soft
I've used for this image: Povray, Breeze Designer.