TITLE: "Opportunity Passing..."
NAME: Charles Fusner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: cfusner@enter.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.silvertome.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cfoppass.jpg
ZIPFILE: cfoppass.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, PSP, Poser, a custom perl script and a specialty POV macro.

RENDER TIME: 
    31 min 38 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4, 1.6mhz with 512 megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


"To the east, occasional lightning still flashed, but Jeffrey faced the other
way. Ahead of him, it looked almost as if the sun might break through before
sunset. It hardly mattered; Jeffrey barely noticed the sky anyway.

"The dolphins were chattering at him again. They always seemed to sense when
he was in these moods and seemed as though they were trying to cheer him up. 
Jeff ignored them too. Another time, perhaps, he would have appreciated their 
efforts, but not now. How could they understand his misery anyway? Afterall, 
this was *their* home..."

---


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Photorealism was not really the goal with this image. In fact, curiously 
enough, when I started, the idea I began with was much more surreal
than this. It was only as I created it that I began altering the concept
more and more. In fact, about the only thing it has in common with the 
original concept is the boy on the rock (and even he isn't where I would
have originally put him!) 

However, as I began adding components, realizing what couldn't be made to 
work in time, and expanding the tale to tell the boy's past and hint at 
the present that was passing him by, I realized this was probably a better
idea than the original concept anyway and concentrated on telling the
tale of a boy stranded at sea in as much detail as I could fit in by the
deadline. 

I could drone on about how every little thing was done, but I believe most
readers of this text already could guess much of it. I've included a fully
detailed log text in the zip file (look for scenelog.txt) for those who 
want to hear more anyway, but here are just the two most noteworthy 
points...

THE BOY ON THE ISLAND ... (Triscan macro gets new shoes for 3.5)
        I got the pose for the boy by dusting of my old Triscan macro which
had been made for MegaPOV and changing a line or two to make it POV 3.5 
compatible. I made the thing originally to see if it could be done, but
although I opined it should be useful for what I used it for here, this
is the first time I actually did so in a project. 
        Anyway, I triscanned a POV heightfield and then imported the result
into Poser as a prop to position the boy. Then I tinkered with him for a
while and finally converted him for import into POV and sat him on the
original height field. 
        The new version (slightly updated) of Triscan is available in the
Packages section of my website. 


PERL MAKES THE SWEEPS ... (my other custom written utility). 
        There are many different sphere_sweeps in this image. The obvious
ones are the dangling lines from the mast of the sunken ship, and several
each for the lightning bolts. There are also three fainter ones shaping 
smoke curling from the background ship's smoke stacks (although in the 
final image, it's mostly lost against the fog). It also allowed me to use
photographs of real lightning to shape the sweeps for the lightning bolts.
        Moray does not yet have support for sphere_sweeps, although it's
been discussed for future development, so I had to get creative. Fortunately,
I'm also studying perl right now and needed a project to test my knowledge
out on anyway. That's how sweepconvert.pl came to be.
        Basically, it parses out specially named spheres from a POV file
and converts them into a UDO/INC pair that defines a declared sphere_sweep
and a rudimentary collection of wireframe lines to stand in for it. This 
allows you to position control points in 3D space graphically using Moray,
export that, and then convert it into a sweep that can be read back into
your Moray scene file to position and test it. It's fairly primitive at 
the moment, but functional. I included a copy of the current edition
and a quickstart guide to using it in the zip file, in case you have perl and 
are interested in trying it out. A slightly improved release may follow when 
I have time to add a few desperately needed features if there's any 
interest.

--
Final note:

Thanks to Thomas de Groot for his rowboat model on the Moray website. 
I didn't use it exactly, since it was a different style of row boat 
than I wanted, and I needed different textures as well. But it was a 
perfect starting point and showed me where I was going wrong on my own 
first efforts at a rowboat.