EMAIL: gman-firebird@geocities.com
NAME: Geoffrey Viljoen
TOPIC: Childhood
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Backyard Swings
COUNTRY: South Africa
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/vista/1457
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0
TOOLS USED: Moray v2.5b, AutoDesk Animator Pro, 
            Chris Colefax's Lense effects include file,
            Sonya Robert's Tree include file, 
            Height Field Lab,
            Blob Sculptor v2 (I think)
RENDER TIME: 5 Hrs 42 Mins 27 secs
HARDWARE USED: Pentium150

SPECIAL THANKS:
My Brother Bryan for his useful and inspiring comments:
Your picture is dumb.
Aww no, not POV again....
Please let me play Dungeon Keeper!
Man, POV is so boring...
I want to play HEXEN 2, get off the computer.
Your picture finally looks OK, wait a minute, what happened to your Frisbee?

Sonya Roberts for useful commentary on my picture.
(And for her tree include file)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The Backyard Swings:
My friend's backyard, complete with swings and angular hose-pipe.
This is my nicest outdoor scene yet, I created this scene after
talking to my friend on the phone one day....

Gregg      : So what should I make?
Geoff (me) : How about a playroom?
Gregg      : Cool, I'll make toys and all sorts of stuff!
Geoff      : Yeah, and make a teddy too!
Gregg      : No way, I can't make a teddy, way too hard.
Geoff      : Sure you can, Use bezier patches (My usual response)
Gregg      : Well, I'll try.... (He made it out of spheres & cylinders :> )
Geoff      : What should I make?
Gregg      : I dunno.
Geoff      : I know, I'll make this cool park scene with trees and swings
             and toys and rolling grass hills and a school in the background
             and the Empire State Building and ......
Gregg      : Nah, You'll never make that....
Geoff      : I guess so... *depressed*
Geoff      : Well I'll try anyway.

AND this is what I came up with. Not really what I expected to make,
but OK anyway. I tried to make the scene with an Autumn type theme.
ie. Falling brown leaves, A red-brown leaved tree, a rake to rake up
the leaves and a nice orange shaded sky to give an Autumn feel.
I tried my best to make everything as realistic as I could but it came
out kinda plastic as usual....
Other than that, I'm very pleased with the result.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Most of the original scene was modelled over about a week and a half
using Moray v2.5b (about 2 hours a day)
The fence, swings, rake, baseball bat & ball, the wooden car, the grass, 
the birds, the tap & hose and the falling leaves were all modelled and 
placed using Moray. The rest of the scene was done by hand, adding little 
bits here and there.

The fence:
A simple fence made of boxes with a dark wood applied to it.

The swings:
Quite a detailed construction,
the seats are a cubes which have been cut by a csg object to make them
round on the edges and a wide cylinder has been cut out of the seat to
make an indentation for the sitting area, there are even drainage holes
cut into the seat, but you can't see them from the camera angle, the chains
are groups of torii and cylinders, the cross bar is a cylinder which is
capped by a joint of three cylindrical SuperEllipsoids and the legs are 
also cylinders capped by more SuperEllipsoids. 
(If you can understand what I just wrote, please mail me)

The Rake:
A csg of cylinders for the pole and various boxes for the Rake spikes.
I don't know if you can see it on the picture, but I even put rivets on
the spikes. :)

The Baseball bat & ball:
The bat is a Rotate sweep object in Moray.
The ball is a sphere with an image-map to make it look as if it has a seam.

The Grass:
A very rough Height-Field produced in HF-Lab and placed in Moray. I tiled
it 8*8 so that the Heightfield wouldn't be too big.

The Wooden Car:
A translate sweep for the body and four cylinders for tyres (Don't say it 
looks unrealistic, because I had one just like it when I was smaller :> )

The Falling Leaves:
These leaves I made using Animator Pro, The are height-fields (*GASP*)
I then used the same height field and added some colour to it to get an
image map for it. They look pretty cool close up (Red Oak leaves I think)

The Birds:
Made from bezier patch objects in Moray.

The Tap & Hose:
A csg of cylinders for the Tap and various cylinders and torus arrangements
to create the bend in the hose. The puddle was created in Blob editor.

Stuff Added by hand:
The first prominent feature is the cool tree.
This was created using Sonya Robert's Tree include file and then scaled
and rotated into the right position (Since Moray uses a Right Handed system)

The Lense Flare was created using Chris Colefax's Lense Effects include file,
I used the softglow option and then modified the original file to change
the effect's colour and turn off the spots it created (They don't go well with
radiosity!)

The nice mellow sky is a sky sphere using POV's standard S_CLOUD3 texture for
the sky sphere. I made some modifications to the SKIES.INC file to make the
sky more red and orange to suit the Lense Flare. (I don't know why SKIES.INC 
doesn't come with some built in Sunset Sky spheres)

Well that's about it, I hope you like my picture. 
(If you've even read this far :> )

BACKGROUND ON ME:
Like Gregg Berry, (Another entrant, his picture is called GB-INFANT)
I am also 16 years old and live in Pretoria, South Africa. I attend
school at Crawford College Pretoria. I have been using POV for a while
now, I have marvelled at the amazing pictures it could make since
POV 1.0. I only started creating my own scene's lately and have started
delving in POV source. I have made 2 or three scenes without a modeller
but it's really difficult. I hope to someday become a Graphics Designer
and make Rendered scenes for MONEY! 
(That'll be the day :> )