TITLE: Awakening NAME: Ron Gow COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: rgow@lanset.com TOPIC: Surrealism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: awake_rg.jpg ZIPFILE: awake_rg.zip RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.5 TOOLS USED: PovTree & TomTreeM macro by Gena Obukhov & Tom Aust SpilinEditor by Alessandro Falappa Paintshop Pro 7 used for conversion to .jpg RENDER TIME: PovRay: 1 hr 22 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 1.8gz 512 mg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: He stared out at the world, revelling in newness. The gray stone walls that had been his world for so long were now opening. SHE had exposed him to color and life. SHE had surrounded him, truth and beauty, fluttering about him on gossamer wings. He was defenseless. SHE seduced him, the candlelight dinner for two, the long, lazy balloon flight over the pole, and the island vacation in the tropics. SHE had awakened his spirit, the Rachmaninoff Preludes, so dark and brooding, yet so strangely uplifting. SHE had conquered him, overcoming his last feeble resistance with the wine. Oh yes, mustn't forget the wine... It all came down to that, he decided, the big question... Was it love, or was it the cabernet? DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: After reading up on surrealism and the processes by which various artists created their work, most of it didn't seem very applicable to ray-tracing, so I devised my own, sort of a virtual version of bits of string dropped on a canvas. I call it the Associative Random Scattergun process. First I just created objects, lots of different kinds of things, whatever popped into my head. Next, I started a new scenefile, put all of my objects into an array, then randomly selected objects from the array and randomly placed them in the scene. Then I would look at the resulting render and see what kind of associations my mind made between objects. I did several of these renders, making associations between them. The strongest associations I kept, discarding the others until I was down to mostly the objects you see. Then I started a new scene, manually placing things to strengthen the mental associations, and adding sky, water and lighting to make a real scene out of it. (And I still have a lot of objects left over for future scenes!) Sky_sphere is layered pigments, blended into the horizon with some fog. Water is stacked planes to give the color fade with depth. Islands are prisms with a conic sweep, made from splines drawn in SpilinEditor. I had originally tried height_fields, but they looked too natural. The prisms gave me the very sharply defined contours which I thought just looked more surreal. Stone path is superellipsoids placed along a spline using the reorient_trans() macro and the the trace() macro. Many thanks to Jim & Luke at the PovRay newsgroups for their help with the spline path. Wine bottle & goblets are lathe objects. Trees and bushes made with PovTree, except the palm trees which are the sample file included in Tomtree. Gazebo, furniture, blimps & piano are all CSG. Butterfly is a sphere_sweep body with height_field wings. Almost everything is in light_groups so I could control how highlights and shadows interacted, and to help separate the colors and objects. All light_groups have global_lights on to get shadow direction from the sun, a parallel light. Textures are all procedural by me except the butterfly wings which are an image_map made from pictures I found on the web, and the furniture, which uses T_Wood24 from woods.inc with my own satin finish. Wanted to try radiosity, but it was a 45+ hour render and after the fifth time it was stopped by power failures I gave up. Zip file contains everything except the tree files & the sheet music which is copyrighted. Also I converted the image_map for the butterfly wings to .jpg and reduced it to save space. Thanks everyone for all the nice comments in the last round and good luck to everyone in this round.