TITLE: Musings
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmnatur.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmnatur.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.02a.f1 Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

Aerial photos book
English village book
Deskdraw, Photoshop and a Wacom tablet to draw the heightfield and imagemap
Poser to render the human figure
Graphic Converter to convert the results to gif


RENDER TIME: 
    0 hours 9 minutes 11.0 seconds (551 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Power Macintosh G3 510

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A man sits with a picnic basket where he's had some good picnics,
some good memories, in the past, and remembers those other occasions.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Usually, I seem to spend most of the time for an entry on the central
objects, and leave the setting until it's almost too late.  This
time, for some reason, I built the setting first and left the central
objects until the last two days!  One day I'll get more organised.

I had this mental image of a lake in front of hills/mountains, and
drew a heightfield for that.  The actual scenery uses two copies of
the heightfield; one for the extremes of height and depth, and one
to provide the grass surface with a hole for the lake.

The trees were copied from photos in some books; I intentionally
didn't want to use Sonya Roberts' include file, but to make some
more impressionistic trees of my own.  I should probably have used
a blob object for the foliage though.

I tried using anti-aliasing.  That took a lot longer to render, and
the texture for the trees' foliage was destroyed by it, so I haven't
used it in the final scene.

The picnic basket is modelled on one I've got, though the texture on
the lid, and the internal texture never worked out the way I wanted
them to.  Given its size in the final image, that doesn't really
matter.

Since you can't currently wrap an imagemap around a Poser figure
once it's been imported to POV as triangles, I thought about how I
was going to colour it as I wanted, and finally decided to take the
Poser rendering and apply it as a transparent imagemap, as a sort
of cardboard cutout :-) .  Apparently, the background which looked
white in Poser was actually a pale grey; at least, I assume that's
why the box is visible :-( .

What else?  Oh yes, I used fog for the first time to make the hills
look more distant.  The fog has also washed out the sky sphere I
used :-( .  Oh, and the rippled transparent texture for the lake
was commented out in test renderings, and I forgot to put it back in!
I should have used an #if to comment it out instead :-( .

And I like my new computer, which rendered and rerendered this image
several times at 800x600 on the deadline day much faster than my old
computer could have rendered a small preview size :-) .