TITLE: Darwin
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: no13@ozemail.com.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~no13
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 13nature.jpg
ZIPFILE: 13nature.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows. 3.01 Beta 2(b)

TOOLS USED: 
    Paintshop Pro, Autocad, Rhino3d, Poser2

RENDER TIME: 
    15 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II with 128Mb ram, 1Gb swap space, Nt4 OS

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A portrait of Charles Darwin, with a volcanic island of the Gallapagos in the
background.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The zip file contains the full source code for the image, including the hair
ballistic macro "ballistic.inc". In order to render the image yourself you
should first run the file "hfield.pov" to create the height field required by
the main scene. Also be warned, the parse time for my render was 30 minutes
with th above hardware.

The image was created in serveral stages. First I rewrote the ballistic macro I
had created for the previous round. The old version created "hair" from a
single origin. The new version creates hair from the surface of a triangle
(that has been extracted from a mesh). This made it possible to accurately
locate regions of hair.

The base figure was created in Poser, then exported to Rhino3d as a 3dstudio
file. After rotation and translation it was exported to Autocad 14 as a Autocad
V12 DXF file. The mesh was then exploded and regrouped for facial and clothing
features. It was also grouped for hair regions. The Autocad file was the
reimported into Rhino3d as a 3dstudio file. In Rhino3d the meshes were then
exported to POV format.

I wrote a little Perl utility to parse the pov mesh used for the hair and output
a nicely formatted file with all the calls required to "ballistic.inc" Then
came the process of manipulating the core ballistic properties to produce the
various hair effects required for the beard, eye brows and hair.

The wrinkles on the face are a bump map created using Paint Shop Pro 5. The skin
texture was originally rendered as a pov texture, imported and manipulated in
Paint Shop and then applied as an image map. 

The background is a simple landscape scene. As previously stated the island
height field was created using pov (spotlights and the wrinkles normal). There
is a custom sky sphere and a little fog for effect.

The final scene was rendered with radiosity and an area light as I wanted it to
appear to be late in the evening with a soft, warm light.