TITLE: Mirage

NAME: James Edward Gray II and Dana Gray
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: raytracing@grayproductions.net
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jdg_mir.jpg
ZIPFILE: jdg_mir.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Carrara 3.0.4


TOOLS USED: 
    The Carrara Powerpak and Photoshop CS 8.0


RENDER TIME: 
    approximately one and a half hours


HARDWARE USED: 
    a Dual 2.0 G5 running Mac OS X.3.5 and
             a Dual 533 G4 running Mac OS X.3.5


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A desert is a place devoid of a desirable thing or an area of land often
consisting of only sand, gravel or rock.  Our goal in this picture was to
capture the essence of  both definitions.  It is a yellow sandy wasteland with
rocky mountains in the distance.  In the center of the picture is a pool of
water reflecting the image of a great palace that isn_t there. A few lone palm
trees help emphasize the feeling of vast emptiness and desolation.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

My husband has always loved ray tracing and when he asked me if I would help him
make a picture for this round, I said, Why not?  I_ve fiddled with POV a little
in the past and enjoyed it, but Carrara was new to me.   So we used this entry
as a learning project for me and found it to be a great deal of fun and a good
way to spend our evenings and weekends together.

The first week of the competition was spent throwing out ideas we thought
conveyed the feeling of Desert, ideas ranging in scope to the basic desert
still life to a deserted old house to Mars.  Finally, we narrowed it down to
two:  the land rovers on Mars and the picture we ultimately came up with.  We
debated back and forth and spent time looking up pictures of both desert scenes
and pictures of the land rovers and Mars landscape.  Unable to decide, we set
out to make both and then enter the one we liked the best.  

We started with the desert palace scene.  We looked up images of desert palace
pictures on the internet and made up some of our own designs, piecing together
the things we liked the best from the different images we found.  But it wasn_t
quite right.  One night, after deciding for the tenth time that some part of
our palace didn_t look right, we stumbled across a picture on the internet of
the Sultan_s Palace in Bandar Seri Begawan, a tiny oil-rich Islamic sultanate
lying on the northwest coast of Borneo.  It was perfect!

So we scrapped everything we had done up to that point and began deciphering the
various pictures we were able to find of the place.  What we couldn_t
determine, we made up but we tried to stay as true to the palace as possible. 
We drew out a roughly scaled image of the wall plans and began building the
pieces that would make up the palace.  Ultimately, our version of the palace
was made up of 1,271 individual pieces.  

We have two machines in our home, a dual processor G5 Macintosh and a dual
processor G4 Macintosh.  We kept both pretty busy working on this picture.  At
first, we worked mostly on the G4, shaping the columns and walls, but as my
comfort level with Carrara grew and our time grew shorter, we branched out.  I
took on the task of creating and texturing the domes and lamps and my husband
worked on the colonnades and odd shaped pieces.  

About 25 hours and five weeks later, we had a complete palace.  With a problem. 
A big problem.  The stone texture we created SUCKED!   Basically, we were
trying to map a stone texture we created to hundreds of different sized objects
with many different facets.  Naturally, it looked different on every single
object. So, with a little help from the Carrara list, we set out to make a
better texture.  Ultimately, we exported the palace objects (minus anything
that wasn_t stone) and then imported it as a single vertex object and textured
it as one.  Viola!  A good looking stone texture across the entire palace.    


It was mostly texture work after that and my husband came through, working close
to ten hours or so on getting the sand and mountains and palm trees just right
to create the effect of extreme heat, isolation and distance.  Our goal was to
make the viewer feel the longing of the palace in the water, the place that
would mean escape from the heat and dry, arid loneliness of the endless dunes.