TITLE: Chromatic Garden
NAME: Andrew Clinton
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: clintona@ibm.net
WEBPAGE: http://www3.sympatico.ca/dclinton/pov/povplace.htm
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: acgarden.jpg
ZIPFILE: acgarden.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.3 Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Smooth.exe (For tga HF smoothing), Paint Shop Pro 6 (For
image map editing and conversion to JPG), Netscape Navigator (For finding 
useful photos on the internet), PovRay 3.1 for Windows (For everything 
until I got the MegaPov.)

RENDER TIME: 
    ~25h NOTE 235 MB memory used (virtual)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 333 Mhz 64 MB Ram 17'' Monitor

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A colourful, vibrant garden, inspired by the absence of such things here in 
Canada :)  Honestly, there are already feet of snow here.  The layout, 
design, and execution of this scene all from my imagination.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


There is so much I could say about this scene, and what I learned creating 
it, that I can hardly fit it all in this little text file (and have people 
read it!)  I will just briefly touch on each of the elements in the scene, 
and if you still have questions I hope you will download the source and/or 
send me an email!

1) Flowers, plants, and upward growing things.

I wrote 3 major recursive macros to create the vegetations.  The first that 
I wrote, probably the simplest, is used to make the purple/yellow flowers 
lining the walkway.  Simple cones are used for the stems and clipped 
spheres are used to make these plants.  More on the image maps later.

The second macro is used for the four trees (white, pink, white, pink) and 
the two red bushes in the foreground.  I used the above macro as a template 
and built in the ability to use blobs for the more noticeable regions 
(ex. trunk).  I also included some randomness in the stems so they are not 
straight.

The third macro makes the fence vines and leafy vegetations in the garden.  
This was the major reason I upgraded to Superpatch (and within a few days 
MegaPov) so I could use splines.  The stems of these vines are randomly 
generated splines, with leaves/flowers placed at semi-random positions.

2) Image maps

I became way to familiar with alpha masking feature in PSP in creating this 
scene.  Every single petal and leaf in the scene is an alpha masked image.  
I started with photographs (many from www.snap-shot.com) then isolated the 
object, then filtered and airbrushed, and exported to tga.  I've included 
some of these images in my .zip but not all (some are fairly big!)

3) Walkway

The brick walkway is generated using several #while loops and rounded 
boxes.  I selectively overlayed some of the colour textures using #if 
statements in the loop.

4) Fountain

The body is a 52-point lathe object (all one peice).  The falling water is 
made with blobs and more random numbers.

5) Sky and Environment

Clouds in this scene are thanks to Jaime Vives' impressive cloud include 
files.  I made two modifications for this scene: 1. I changed the stacked 
planes to stacked spheres (to eliminate the horizon problem).  2. I added 
a simple texture_map to another copy of the file to create the sirrus 
clouds.  There are 3 calls to the macro, each creating a different layer 
of clouds.

6) Dirt maps

There are 3 height_fields used, 1 on each side of the path and 1 in the 
background.  I painted the elevations in PSP then smoothed the 8-bit file 
into a 16-bit file using Smooth.exe.  There are some image_maps used to 
create trodden trails in the background (but you probably can't see it!)

7) Render settings

I used a single 3*3 area_light 100 units from the scene, as well as a 
shadowless point light at the camera location to lighten the shadows.  
If you look at the source code, you may see some radiosity settings but 
I didn't have time to use them (or fix all the textures to be complient).

Hope you can understand a little bit better now.. and send me an email 
if you need help!
AC

Credit where credit is due...

Jaime Vives for the clouds and helpful pre-competition comments.
Freinds/Family for encouragement and more comments.
www.snap-shot.com for original photography (that I extensivly edited.)
Other free texture websites for ideas and starting points.
Nathan Kopp, Ron Parker & the Pov Team for the best free raytracer...