TITLE: Taking Wing NAME: Sonya Roberts COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com TOPIC: Flight COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition JPGFILE: takewing.jpg ZIPFILE: takewing.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.00e.watcom.Win32 TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 3.0 and Paint Shop Pro 4 to create imagemaps. HLab for creation of height fields. Texture Magic for creation of the clouds texture (based on the Clouds texture that comes with Texture Magic). Chris Colefax's excellant lens flare include file for a lens flare effect. My own nested-loop tree .pov file for the foreground trees. My own nested-loop .pov files for the creation of the "furry" cones and cylinder. POVRay 3.00 interface (with customized insert menu) for all coding. My unassisted and overworked brain to layout and plan objects. RENDER TIME: 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 47 second to render 33,697objects HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 w/32 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg Graphics Card IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It's early spring. The morning mist is only just beginning to burn off of the lake. Overnight, a fruit tree has burst into bloom, and is now attracting several large orange & yellow butterflies to feast on it's abundant nectar (and spread it's pollen far and wide). Several giant dragonflies have emerged from the lake this morning as well, metamorphozing from swimming nymphs into flying adults. Exalted, they skim along the edge of the lake on newly-dried wings, their old skins abandoned somewhere within the nearby bed of cattails. A couple of large green and blue butterflies have also flown up, to pay attention to the many smaller flowers clustered around the trees. A colony of subterranean beetles is undergoing it's annual spring swarming, as tiny worker beetles escort the larger winged adolescent drones and queens to the surface. Already they've attracted the attention of a furry, anteater-like creature. Eyes bulging with excitement, it's long tongue has already speared one hapless worker beetle. It'll feast well before the colony has finished swarming; but the little escort beetles are successfully fulfilling their suicidal function of providing distraction, and several of the valuable adolescents have taken wing, fleeing inland to safety, where they will spread out to found new colonies of burrowing beetles. The small escort beetles won't escape to the safety of the burrow until the last adolescent has flown away or been consumed. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The two varieties of butterflies and the dragonflies were all created using image maps. The wing patterns were drawn and colorized in Paint Shop Pro 4, copied to Photoshop for blurring, cleanup, and conversion to 256-colour mode, then back into Paint Shop Pro to be saved as GIF's (Photoshop seems to do a marginally better job of colour reduction; among other things, it very conveniently always puts white, my background colour, in the "0" indexed position). The bodies of the butterflies and dragonflies are simple assemblies of squashed and stretched spheres, cones, and torii (Do you think you can see letters on the wings of the blue-green butterfly? Good, 'cause they're there!). The trees in the foreground were created using a nested-loop .pov file of my own, available at my POV-Stuff page at http://www.geocities.com/Soho/Lofts/1022 - though after seeing how Chris Colefax's excellant lens flare #include file works, I plan to do a few revisions to the current file and post a new version. The trees on the far shore are simply stretched spheres on top of short cones, with a crand effect applied. They're distributed over an area using nested loops and a rand() function, and their colours (the different shades of green) are also generated based on a rand() function. The cattails along the near shore are also sized and distributed using nested loops and rand(). The flowers are sized and rotated using rand(), and most involved nsted loops and/or rand() in their creation at some level or another. The distant mountains and nearby rocks were both created using HLab; rather that include the .POT files, which are rather sizeable, I've included the .SCR files used to create them. The mountains were coloured using a .GIF file (based on the POT file) to indicate where green, grey, and white were to be placed. This .GIF was created in Paint Shop Pro, and converted to 256 color mode in Photoshop. The "furry" creature was made using some shapes I've created as part of a separate project I've been working on; so far, I've put together files for the creation of furry cones and cylinders, and am now working on one for furry spheres or hemispheres. The "fur" is formed of thousands and thousand and thousands of very thin cones, arranged along the surface of a user-defined cone or cylinder using - you guessed it! - nested loops and the rand() function (What, you think I placed umpteen-thousand little cones BY HAND? Or using a modellor? Not on your life!). Once these "fuzzy primitives" are finished, I'll be posting them on my web page too. The grass texture is an image map that I cropped out of a rather larger one that comes with 3D Studio Max.