TITLE: The Burial
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/pshawpsoft/
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sks_bury.jpg
ZIPFILE: sks_bury.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray (started with 3.1, finished with 3.5)

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser 4, Crossroads, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Paint Shop Pro, under Win
98

RENDER TIME: 
    41m 19s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P2, 266 mhz, 96 mg, 4 mg video card


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    They started west not long after the Revolution ended, past
the new frontier settlements and the old French towns, till the forest met the
tallgrass prairie.  Along the way, little Micah grew ill; the place where he
died was the place they stayed, unwilling to leave his grave behind in
trackless wilderness.  Ezekial carved his marker from a slab of oak; two years
later, he carved another for baby Esther, who lived less than a day.  But their
other children grew strong and tall, and moved on.  Last summer, Sarah found
Ezekial slumped against the woodpile, one cold hand clutching his sunken chest.
 It was all she could do to wrap his body in an old sheet and drag it down to
the little graveyard, but she managed.  She'd go on managing, she told herself
then.  She'd heard a few years back that this part of the Territory had become
a state.  Surely folks would begin to come this way again.  Meanwhile, she
could still grow a few hills of corn and beans and punkins, the crick was full
of catfish, and she could chop dead wood for a fire.  And, above all, thank the
Lord for this good old yeller dog to keep her company...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    Well, obviously, lots and lots of
Gilles Tran's wonderful grass (and also a couple of trees)--visit
www.oyonale.com and be filled with joy and awe.  Sarah is a Poser 4 figure,
converted to POV with Crossroads.  The daisies between the grave markers came
from some dang shareware flower-making program I used to have, a couple of
hard-drive crashes ago, and I wish I remembered its name.  The chunks of chert,
jasper, and other Missouri tiller-breakers began life as triangle-mesh spheres,
which were then tweaked all out of shape with an ugly little sphere-tweaking
macro.  The shovel is just CSG.  The graves and grave markers and the distant
hills are height fields, drawn with PhotoDeluxe.  (Ol' Yeller's cross is two
height fields nailed together.)  The sky is one of those ridiculously simple
little things that actually happens to look kinda nice (SKS_Sunset.inc,
included).
     About halfway through the project, I downloaded POV 3.5.  Oh, happy
day--isosurfaces!  The split rails for the fence are wedges chopped out of a
cylinder function and splintered and cracked with a stretched-out agate
function.  S-L-O-W, but what fun!
     I used PhotoDeluxe to add the title, copyright, and URL lines, and PSP to
convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (72 DPI, compression level
5).