TITLE: Innocent Shadow NAME: Mark Slone COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: slone@hiwaay.net TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright. JPGFILE: ishadow.jpg ZIPFILE: ishadow.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Photoshop 5.0 LE RENDER TIME: 4 days 5 hours HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh Powerbook 550MHz G4 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The outline of a young girl jumping rope is emblazed on a wall in Nagasaki, Japan. The girl's jump is frozen in mid air, and so too is the instant the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki, August 9th, 1945, 11:02am. BACKGROUND: In elementary school I learned shadows were burned into stone and wood by the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The haunting images of people's shadows, recording the instant of their deaths, had a great impact on me. The burned-in shadows are the surface's original color, protected from the atomic flash, leaving a darker or lighter color emblazed around the figures. Since many people are not aware of this effect, there are hints in the image that can lead them to its meaning. The Japanese WWII military flag (rays extending from a sun) is represented above the doorway, and Japanese text can be seen on the fire hydrant and the tablet. The (somewhat controversial) text on the tablet is from a memorial at Hiroshima. In English it reads: "Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil." The origami cranes are a reference to the story of Sadako Sasaki, who was exposed to the bomb when she was two and died of leukemia ten years later. Before she died Sadako folded many cranes, following the Japanese legend that the gods would grant her a wish if she folded 1000 cranes. Since then schoolchildren around the world have folded cranes as a wish for peace. Only the brick wall was changed by the flash, leaving an imprint on it alone. Also, mortar in the brick wall forms the shape of a mushroom cloud, and barely discernable images of bombed-out buildings are at the base. The leaves and lighting are arranged to give the faint impression of a burning city. The tilted perspective counters the static nature of the image, and echos the ominous viewpoint of the bomb. I chose colors that lean the image toward a sandy, almost sepia tone. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Most of the objects in this image are isosurfaces created using POV-Ray's text editor. They're lit by seven area lights and radiosity. The sun and bird drawings are by my niece, Slone Clement. The cranes are modified versions of "Orizuru" by Mitsuhiro Seike. The green plant leaves and the tree (in shadow) were drawn using the "Tree macro" by Gilles Tran, Ken Tyler, Steven Pigeon and others. The fire hydrant_s chain was drawn using Rob Antonishen_s _Chain.inc._ All of these are available at the POV-Ray Objects Collection: www.povworld.de/objects. The girl_s outline is from a photograph I had taken of my niece. I added a dress and other minor changes so it would look like the shadow of a Japanese schoolgirl. The nuclear shadow was created by putting the brick wall in a light group. The shadows place the scene about 800 meters from ground zero. While the flash was fast enough to freeze the girl's image, the rope would have been partially blurred. To blur the rope, I used multiple copies of a semi-transparent torus, rotated slightly from each other so the tied ends of the rope remain sharp. The wall was constructed using a wrinkle isosurface mortar with individual bricks placed using POV's trace feature. A slightly different surface was used for locating the bricks so that some are washed over by the mortar. Image maps in the isosurfaces bring out the mushroom cloud and buildings. The leaves are a macro in which images of sugar maple leaves are mapped onto different sized spheres to add curvature, with a granite texture and cone-and-sphere stems. The sphere shape helped but the leaves still look a little flat. I created an isosurface version that looked better but the render time went through the roof. I used POV's "Original" anti-alias method for the final render because it gives the scene a gritty look. It also helped the render time which rose alarmingly toward the end. Everything you need to render this image is included in the zip file. The image files are reduced from their original size to save space but it will render very close to the entry image.