TITLE: Abandoned Homestead
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/povray/
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmruins.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmruins.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 

  Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (jpeg conversion and heightfield/imagemaps)
  Paper, pencil, ruler.
  Chris Colefax's Object Bender include file

RENDER TIME: 

  Ground heightfield: 3 min 32 sec
  Final image: 2 hrs 7 min 46 sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


After one drought too many, the sheep station on the edge of the
Australian desert was abandoned and left to decay. The ruins of the
building lie amid the ruins of one man's dream.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


At first I despaired for an idea for this topic, because Ruins implies
ancient civilisations, and I wanted to do something Australian - and
the oldest buildings here are less than 200 years old! Then I
remembered the ruined farmhouse photo by Ken Duncan, which Midnight Oil
used on the cover of their album Diesel and Dust. Quintessentially
Australian ruins! This is basically a reproduction of that photo, but
I couldn't resist adding a water pump windmill, which was simply
fun to make in CSG. :-)

The scene was all hand-coded in the POV-Ray text editor.
The homestead and windmill are CSG primitives. Chris Colefax's
Object Bender include file was used to bend the sandstone CSG
primitives on the sides of the steps. The basic sandstone base texture
was hand-painted in PSP. An extra texture layer gives it a dirty and
worn appearance. I tried differencing off some Julia fractals along
the edges to show actual chips out of the rock, but I couldn't get
it to work well, so gave up on that.

The corrugated iron of the roof was rusted with a layered bozo
texture, embeddd in a brick pattern to produce the unrusted areas
between the sheets of iron.

The ground is made up of three components. The foreground is a
heightfield generated by another POV file which just made a simple
texture which I modified slightly in Paint Shop Pro to add the tyre
tracks. The mid ground is just a plane with a turbulent onion normal.
The hills in the background are heightfields hand-painted in PSP.

The rocks are simply superquadric ellipsoids, rotated, then scaled
randomly and positioned randomly. A bozo colour_map and some granite
normal texturing makes them look like rocks. The dead grass is just
cylinders, placed randomly - a simple modification of the iris macro
I used in my Monet entry last round.

I wanted a stark sky to match the stark landscape. It's a simple
sky_sphere with a bit of turbulence, rotated by trial and error to
get the effect I wanted.

Once again the tyrrany of time prevents an entry from being
completed to anything like my original conception. :-(
Given the luxury of more time, I'd polish up the textures a bit more
(or rather, make them dirtier!) and try to make the walls out of
individual stones, rather than just a block with an image map.

The zip file includes all the POV source, including the file used to
generate the basic foreground heightfield. I've left the actual
heightfield and image map gifs out because they're huge - mail me if
you want them.