TITLE: A drawer of natural items.
NAME: Simon Davis
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: simon.davis@altavista.net
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: drawer.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3, Rhino 3D, Microsoft Image composer, Helixir, PSP5

RENDER TIME: 
    About 5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Kapok P233MMX Notebook, 32Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A drawer containing a picture of Darwin, an egg, several 
shells, some pebbles, a bone, a flower, an atom world.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This is my second submission to IRTC and I had a bit more time 
to come up with something. I had an idea from a CD cover of using a 
collection of natural objects, arranged on a printer's leadtype 
wooden board, but decided that a drawer might be better. 
I didn't want to attempt an entire natural scene, as 
this requires more advanced modelling and other people are far better 
from looking at previous submissions. 

My choice of objects are those which I could easily model :
sphere objects for the egg, atom world and pebbles, an image map onto a 
slightly distorted bezier sheet for the photo of darwin - all 
done on Moray. The shells were done using Helixir - a new program 
designed just to model helix type objects, especially shells 
(freeware from http://www.evolve.co.uk/helixir/). This produced 
UDO's which were imported to Moray. The large shell is taken from 
Steve Gower's July-Aug 96 Bucket of shell's pov code and messed with 
slightly. The bone and drawer handle were modelled with Rhino 3D 
and imported. The flower was my own idea. I copied a petal to 
make a complete flower in Microsoft Image Composer. Saved the image 
for an image map, then greyscaled it an turned it into a height field 
and mapped the flower image on top. I made the stem with a bezier cylinder 
and am reasonably pleased with the result. This technique could be 
used for other flat-bottomed objects taken from photographs 
with  some experimentation. The atom world was just for fun and 
is supposed to resemble the earth as an atom - perhaps not entirely 
natural.

The shell textures need improvement (my notebook has a 800X600 
256 colour display!). The bone is niave (or naff - I tried to 
make it look broken around the middle for variation). I would 
like to have modelled a few more objects, but more experience with 
nurbs-type modellers is necessary I think to make really good 
organic objects.

SD