TITLE: The Garden Path
NAME: Karl Manning
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: karl@pemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.gfxgallery.com
TOPIC: Garden
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: path.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRAY 3.1e.watcom.win32(Pentium II optimised)

TOOLS USED: 

PaintShop Pro 4.14
Various gardening catelogues and photographs


RENDER TIME: 


HARDWARE USED: 
    233MHz PII 64 MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This shows a view along a path in an English country garden,
in the middle of summer.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The whole of this image makes heavy use of the random number generator, while
loops and small spheres and cylinders. Almost every leaf and petal has been
randomly translated, scaled, rotated or coloured to try and give as much
realism as possible.

The fence is one of the few non random objects. It is a few boxes. The texture
is a 2 layer one with a marbled first layer, and bozo'd 2nd layer for the
moss.

The path is lots of small scaled spheres and a bozo texture.

The grass is two torii of the same size, but slightly seperated and then
differenced. This gives a nice curve without resorting to heavy maths. Its also
far less effort to parse it compared to using a bicubic patch.

A similar technique of differencing two spheres was used for the creation of the
white plant and poppy petals.

The yellow/orange daisies (gerberers? apparently) are just made of rotated
cylinders.

The sunflower is similar, but uses an intersection between two cylinders as the
petal shape, because you can't get a pointed end when you scaled a cylinder or
sphere.

The trees have a basic trunk and a few big branches. A "cloud" of flat green
cylinders and long thin brown cylinders then made up the leaf / twig mass. It
creates effective looking trees without having to create all the branches.

The pine trees were however created by making all the branches. Each branch was
a quarter of a torus with various small cylinders hanging off it.

The background hedge was originally made up of approx 40000 (!) cylinders,
scaled and rotated. This coupled with all the other objects within the scene
suddenly pushed the parsing time up from 1 or 2 minutes to 23 minutes, and my
poor hard disk got thrashed !

The solution was to create a close up of the hedge within POV, convert this
image to a gif using Paint Shop Pro and then use it as an image map on a large
box. Vastly reduced parsing times, with little loss in quality, as its only a
background item.

There are quite a few include files etc used to generate this image, so I
haven't included them here. However if you are interested in some of the
techniques I'll send them to you.



Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net
16/12/99