TITLE: Home At Last NAME: Phillip Mabry COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: mabryphillip@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: home.jpg RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7; TOOLS USED: Amapi 4.1, POVRock (author unknown), Makegrass Macro by Gilles Tran, HfLab by John P. Beale, Ant Macro by Micha Riser. RENDER TIME: 30 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 733Mhz, 256M RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two ants return home after a hard day of searching for food. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: There was much MUCH more I should have and could have done, oh well, next round. First I started off with the ground which is a heightfield. I used three layered image maps to texture it. This proved to be much more difficult than I had originally planned. I ended up with some pixilation when it was all said and done, I should have used a larger image map. The one I used is only 100*100. Next I started on the grass. I used a make grass macro that creates the patch of grass and saves it as a mesh file. This proved to be very handy as I could use the same patch and scale it in different directions to deform the shape a little. All the different blades are accually one patch of grass translated and scaled. The texture on the blades is pretty simple. The next issue was the stones. Again, much more trial and error here than I had originally thought. I first tried to use the macro that Jamie used in his work "Running", which creates stones out of blobs. This seemed like a good idea, however, the stones would have been much to smooth. I then searched every RayTracing site until I found my answer. POVRock, this is a cool prog. because you enter you parameters in the dos command line and it will output a stone mesh. It can be as smooth as a river rock or as rough and spiky as a lava rock. Very handy tool. I then wrote a quick loop that would place my rocks randomly. Next I had to tackle the ant(s) (my original scene was going to have but a lone ant). Again I searched the sites and found an ant macro (I didnt accually use the macro, but the ant with in it worked great). The hardest part here was positioning the ant crawling up his ant hill home. All trial and error. I originally wanted to have an ant crawling out of the hill, but had no time left. Placing these objects (all of them) on the heightfield was all trial and error. I must have spent at least 10 hours placing these stones, blades, ants, and ant hill. I still couldn't avoid all collisions. The ant hill was modled in Amapi 4.1 which exports to POV. Again, I could have done a much better job here, but was at the last minute. I textured it similar to the ground. Things I wanted to work on: 1) Ground: I am not at all happy with the grounds texture, or even the heightfield for that matter. But it had to do. 2) Ground Cover: Again, here I had much bigger plans that I didnt even try. For example to place my leaves, twigs, and flowers. I had everything but the twigs ready to go. I never could find the strength to fight the battle of placing them correctly. 3) The Sky: I used a simple Sky Sphere to act as the backdrop while I did all my test renders. I never got around to changing this one bit. (I really need to learn time management) 4) The Ant Hill: I had a much different texture in mind here as well. I learned more making this image than i had ever hoped. I also just got the book Advanced 3d Photorealism by Bill Flemming. Getting it yesterday I could not use any of the techniques it teaches. I had painted myself in a corner.