TITLE: Swallows Go Home! (swgohome.jpg) NAME: Jens Dengler COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: jd@surveyor.in-berlin.de WEBPAGE: http://www.in-berlin.de/User/jd/ TOPIC: Wilderness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: swgohome.jpg ZIPFILE: swgohome.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1g.Linux.gcc TOOLS USED: GIMP (tga-jpg) RENDER TIME: 4h+ HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133MHz 32MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: South Africa in midsummer, in late February, in the humans-free grasslands. The air is steamy. Some rain had refreshed the green in the wide fields. This would be a good time for grasshoppers, if not the swallows from the nearby Cape Mountains would be around, too, taking their all-you-can-eat dinners before they will leave the Southern Hemisphere, moving North into the coming spring in Europe. In its about-15-year-life, every year a swallow does its flight from South to North and back, that's about two times 10.000 kilometer a year. Each travel takes about 40 days. So, within two years only their long distance travels take them once around the world. Everytime they have to surpass the Sahara within 3 days or they will die of dehydration. Everytime they have to pass Mediterranian and North African high nets of the humans who eat them as delicatessen. And every February its the same sigh of the grasshoppers: Swallows go home! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Synopsis: povray +w800 +h600 +v -i swgohome.pov Main thing I wanted to see with this image is whether it is really so difficult to make some better grass. At the IRTC round with the topic ruins I saw some *very* funny sort of grass. - I admid: My own was funny, too. It was a buried naked tree... 8-) This time its a sphere subtracted from a sphere, smashed and stretched, painted with a gradient texture with a bit transparent colors. And another type of dried grass made of cones. The positioning was easy using a two dimensional loop and the random generator with a small grid. On the other hand, the necessary mass of grass is difficult to handle, even more with a slow iron like mine. More than 10.000 grass leafs are causing swapping, making the rendering time way out of bound. Therefore there had to be a bit "intelligent" perspective. As one of my first tries with PoVRay years ago I had modelled an ant of chrome, and the grasshopper has inherented some of the ideas of this metal ant. The swallows are modelled according to some pictures I drew, watching some real swallows in my neighborhood. For the people who thought my previous images were too dark I had included some fill lights this time. But seeing it on a Pissie-Screen not at home, I recognized for the first time that on a different hardware than mine mainly the shadowed parts are really too dark, still. So with the conversion from TGA to JPG I gamma-corrected the colors radically, too. As the final step, because its used so many times and nearly never punished, I wanted to use both focal blur and lens flare, mainly for getting into it. (Both, because focal blur isn't everything, you know, you know, you know? 8-) The focal blur is only sparsely set for smudging the very distance and the very close. Because of this no antialiasing is necessary as a raytracing parameter. Different than with the previous picture this time I take part in terms of the olympic idea, again. Still, the image was about ten days of fulltime work. One problem with the creation time was that in the middle when modelling the swallows... suprisingly I got employed. My prime design for the main wings was to make them out of many smashed spheres simimilar to feathers, but for a first model I made the wings out of a smashed sphere subtracted by a sphere. Because my time was running out, I had to stay with the first model. The (SoftGlow) flare is hopefully not that obtrusive - with it I didn't had to bother making a sun with some halo. Its made with the macros of Chris Colefax (muchos kudos to him). Within the source the used lens effects files are omitted. I recommend to get the latest from his site. -- jd --