TITLE: Shorebirds
NAME: Jim Charter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jrcsurvey@aol.com
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: shorebir.jpg
ZIPFILE: shorebir.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, UV-Mapper, Crossroads, pose2pov

RENDER TIME: 
    ~18 h

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 650

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Shore-birds flocking. 

A flight of birds rising before a distant horizon...the sea as
viewed-from-shore, offers a trope for "boundaries", and the desire to transcend
them. But the image had an additional interest for me,... of a subject
presented through a random set of glimpses, a profile here, a
detail there, from which a sense of the unified
thing may (or may not) be obtained.  

The picture derives from a photograph I saw in
which the telephoto lens seemed to 'penetrate'
a dense flock of rising birds. Within its set
of telephoto 'discoveries' I found a point of 
departure for a raytraced composition.

The image assembles basic approximations of
the feathered structure of a bird's wing, its 
coloring, and the mechanics of its beating in flight.  
Approximations mined from the photograph.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The sky sphere and water plane use straightforward
techniques learned from basic tutorial:
A POV-Ray Water Tutorial ( Michael Hough )

The feathers come in two levels of detail.  The most detailed ones are formed
from prisms, drawn in SpilinEditor (Alessandro Falappa) which are used to clip
the shape from the surface of a scaled sphere.  Primaries, secondaries and
coverts are shaped separately.  Less detailed versions are shaped from
"hand-coded" triangles.  A procedural texture is uv-mapped to each feather.

Wings are composed from the feathers using 
SplineR ( Chris Colefax ) and Macs ( John Vansickle )
to help locate them.

Splines were also used to approximate the angle of incidence
of the wing through its stroke.

Bird bodies are drawn in sPatch ( Mike Clifton ).  A hand-
painted image_map is uv-mapped to the body using the 
recipe outlined in the tutorial:
"Using UV-mapping with POV-Ray meshes" ( Gilles Trans ) 
which is under his description of the UV-Mapper tool 
( Steven Cox ) Also necessary to this recipe are: pose2pov ( Steve Sloan ) and
Crossroads ( Keith Rule )

The image pivots on the use of MegaPov's motion-blur feature
which is applied to a subset of birds in the flock.