TITLE: Sunflowers
NAME: Mike Hough
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com
WEBPAGE: free.prohosting.com/~olana
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sunflowr.jpg
ZIPFILE: sunflowr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV

TOOLS USED: 
    Hash Animation Master, POV editor, Wordpad, Paint Shop Pro 5

RENDER TIME: 
    About 2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 333 256 Megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I got a late start to creating my entry.  I originally planned a large garden
with terraces and ground covers with large, majestic sunflowers as the
centerpiece.  Unfortunately the seeds were slow to germinate.  I chose the 'ye
ole' seed company expecting heirloom quality plants.  Now on one hand I can't
accuse the Ye Ole Company of false advertising, but on the other hand those old
seeds didn't appear to have much pep left in them.  I tried increasing the
brightness of the light_sources and different colors to get those little seeds
to grow, to no avail.

It'll be awhile before I can show my face at the POV garden club again.  :-(


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started out by gathering a few reference objects:  A styrofoam cup, some seeds
from the bird feeder, and a photo of some sunflowers.  I modeled the cup first
in A:M, then exported it to POV format using an exporter that I wrote.  The
exporter creates a material file, which I edited to add the cellular pattern to
the normal using crackle.  Then I added the dirt by making a height_field with
the inner circle of the image a sort of choppy fractal look and then outside of
the image black, which I used to clip the height_field by setting the water
level.

The seed pack is a superellipsoid that is extremely squashed.  The top is made
to look ripped by a gradient y pattern with the photo of sunflowers overlaid on
top.  I made the table using another superellipsoid that looks like a
rounded-box, then cut a little bevel out of the edges with a box passed through
a #while loop.  Wood pattern is one of the textures from woods.inc with a few
transformations applied to get the grain to look normal.

I created the seeds and plants in A:M.  The seeds have a gradient pattern of
dark greys and off-white to make the stripes.  Multiple copies of the seeds
were made using a while loops and some random number generation.  Lastly, I
textured the plants using a gradient pattern that starts out white near the
bottom then gets darker green near the top, with the leaves receiving a wrinkle
pattern of different tints of green.

Rendering uses an area_light with about 8^2 samples to get the soft shadows
looking smooth.  The new radiosity written by Nathan Kopp was used as well,
with a recursion level of 4.  To increase render time and improve the look of
the curved surface of the cup, I used type 2 bicubic patches (originally found
in the Superpatch).

The POV exporter for A:M is available on my web page.  MegaPOV is available from
nathan.kopp.com.