TITLE: An Offering to the POV-Ray Gods NAME: Mark Wagner COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Rengaw03/ TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mw_offer.jpg ZIPFILE: mw_offer.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Man 0.62 TOOLS USED: GIMP for JPEG conversion, ClothRay RENDER TIME: 2 min for rendering, 10+ hours parsing time to create the robe and altar cloth HARDWARE USED: 400MHz AMD K6-II IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A figure making an offering to the POV-Ray Gods, in hopes of being able to produce a good render. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The candles are stock objects from my "small items" collection. The chrome sphere is just that: a chrome sphere. Nothing special. The floor is a checkered plane -- not a box, not a polygon, not a disk, but an actual plane. The figure was created using version 4.1 of Peter Houston's BlobMan utility. The objects in the offering bowl were placed using a macro that treats them as spheres, and packs them as tightly as possible. Although not all of the objects are spheres, they are close enough for this technique to look good. The robe and tablecloth were created using Christophe Bouffartigue's ClothRay. The original version of the cloth on the altar was created using J_r_me M. Berger's ClothSim, but that resulted in a cloth that appeared to be made of heavy canvas. ClothRay produced a altar cloth that looked better, in much less time, but with the problem that the cloth went through the edges of the table. I fixed this by scaling the cloth by a factor of 1.1 in the x and z directions. I could (and probably should have) fixed this by rounding the edges of the altar, but this would have increased the parsing time. Interestingly, the size of the folds in the cloth appears to be dependant on the resolution of the mesh. When I tried using a mesh with twice the resolution, the number of folds went up, and the individual folds got smaller. The figure's robe was also created using ClothRay. The basic procedure was to drape a cloth square over the torso and legs of a BlobMan in the same kneeling posture as the final figure, then make cutouts in the cloth for the neck and arms. My original idea was to have a relatively stretchy cloth, but my first attempt produced something so stretchy, it made rubber look stiff. My second attempt was even worse -- the cloth just fell through the figure, instead of draping. The final version uses the same settings as the cloth on the altar. I would have liked to have done some additional experiments, but with a day of processing every time I made a change, I didn't have time. Lighting consists of two spotlights. One, located near the camera, provides a dim overall light to the scene. A second spotlight is tightly focused on the offering, and works to define the shapes of the individual items. Two lights in the candle flames provide a little additional light to the altar area, since the scene didn't look realistic without shadows at the bases of the candles. The camera view was chosen to give the impression of a "god's eye" view of the scene. Scene composition and final rendering were done in POV-Man 0.62. I could have done all the work in ClothRay, since ClothRay is based on POV-Man, but the Windows version of POV-Man displays the image during rendering, while ClothRay doesn't.