TITLE: The Border Between
NAME: Nicklas Brandefelt
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: nicklas@atom.msi.se
WEBPAGE: http://msiw37.msi.se/~nicklas/start/
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: brandefe.jpg
ZIPFILE: brandefe.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1g for windows

TOOLS USED: 
    moray(texture on red guy only), corel photopaint (-jpg,name,
heightfieldgif), sPatch (fiction tree-trunk)

RENDER TIME: 
    13h59m48s

HARDWARE USED: 
    amd k6-2, 192Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

It's a thin line between reality and fiction and here is that line.
Garding this line from trespassers is a tower. Luckily the guards on the
fiction side are not so serious so some fiction can slip into reality
(can you find the trespasser?).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The idea I got right away from the topic. Lets start with the reality side:
The tower is built up of boxes with some while loops and textured with a
cracked normal. It is a only slightly modifed version of a tower I have used
before. The mountains are textured heightfields. The hills is a mesh created
from sinuses. I had to do this as I don't know how to get the height of a
heightfield in a specific point. I needed this to place the leaves and grass.
Using mathematical functions this was of course easy. 
I first tried to get a realistic texture so that I didn't need grass. The
result was not too bad but it looked a little too much like a golf-green.
If you take away the grass in the zip-files you can see it.
The grass is only
triangles, one per straw. The leaves are a couple of triangles modeled by hand
in the texteditor. The modell was created prior to the competition but the
texture I have worked a lot with. Which colors are autum leaves anyway?? Here
in sweden they are all gone. The trees are made up from a bransch macro that
I call repeatedly. I wanted to create the recursively by defining a bransch as
something with bransches but I guess this is not allowed. In the end this was
better. The actuall code that calls the macro needs more work to be able
to produce different trees. I have used the same tree three times because
of lack of time but I gues it is nothing you see easily ( they are rotated).
Oh, the tree was also created prior to this competition.
So the fiction side:
The clouds are spheres (I tried with blobs but couldn't get it to work).
The texture is  simple with large phongs. I tried some fancy stuff but it
didn't work out. The mountains are cones textured similarly (I do like them
this simple!). The lake is textured with irid to make it look oily. From
the begining you could see the lake on the reality side too with a more
realistic surface but in the end I could not solve the composition so that
you could see it. The tower is highly reflected with a wave normal. This
was the only way I could make it look funny as most of it is in the shadow
and the light get a bad angle. The trees are a trunk created with sPatch
(thanks to all at the irtc-mail-list that helped me get a hold on this nice
program). The surface is a cracked normal. The leaves? are two spheres
textured with bump-maps. The hills are sine-squared and the resolution
on the mesh choosen to make the triangles show (I liked that). Finally
the red guys the main object on this side are modelled by hand in a texteditor
with blobs, and put in a macro so you can controll legs and arms. The baby
is made with the legs not visible and scaled down. The textured I worked hard
on, trying out the texture editor in moray. I especially worked on the pigment
to make it look clayish so he would stand out from his world. What I learned
from this work was that you have
to plan your composition carefully first to avoid a lot of extra work.
I hope you didn't get bored by the detail but
this is how I like to find the description when I look on others work.