TITLE: Little Boy Blue
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
TOPIC: Toys and Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sks_blue.jpg
ZIPFILE: sks_blue.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser, Crossroads, Photoshop, under Windows 2000

RENDER TIME: 
    12h 53m 49s (plus about an hour for the saved radiosity file)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon, 1.1 Ghz, 256 mg


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  The little toy dog is covered with dust,
  But sturdy and stanch he stands;
  And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
  And his musket moulds in his hands.
  Time was when the little toy dog was new,
  And the soldier was passing fair;
  And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
  Kissed them and put them there.
     --from "Little Boy Blue" by Eugene Field

The complete poem may be found at:
  http://www.poetry-archive.com/f/little_boy_blue.html


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

     This scene is based on a poem my mother used to read to me when I was very
young.  I wanted to create a sharp contrast between the life and light outside
and the moment of grief frozen for years within the dark and dusty room.  The
sunlight is extra bright at rgb < 3.0, 3.0, 2.6 >; that's the only light_source
in the scene.  (Thanks to Jaime Vives Piqueres for the excellent tutorial at
www.ignorancia.org on saving and loading radiosity files; otherwise, this
render would *still* be running.)  The atmospheric dust inside the room
consists of scattering media inside a transparent box filling the end of the
room.
     The little toy dog was inspired by the gingham dog from another Eugene
Field poem, "The Duel" (also known as "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat"). 
Its body was built from blob objects.  The texture was applied to each piece
with a spherical warp, scaled and rotated to get a reasonably good fit, while
preserving enough distortion to indicate the stretching of the fabric when the
toy was stuffed.  I also vertically offset the texture slightly on each side,
because (1) if the dog were made from scraps left over from the curtains (and
perhaps pillowcases and so forth) there might well not have been enough
material to allow extra for matching the pattern; and (2) matching checks,
plaids, or stripes is tricky even when the seams aren't curved.  I used trace
to place the ears (lined with plain white starched fabric), nose and mouth
(embroidered in black), and tortoiseshell button eyes.  The dust is a slope
texture applied to a second copy, scaled very slightly larger, of each body
part (in order to layer one patterned texture over another).  The absence of
dust on the eyes was a deliberate choice.
     The toy soldier is a Poser model.  The cap and rifle were downloaded from
www.greylight.com and fiddled with quite a bit to make them fit the way I
wanted.  The finished model was converted to POV with Crossroads (with a brief
stop in TrueSpace 3 to circumvent an odd problem with the OBJ file).  Rather
than uv_mapping, I used a slope texture applied to the mesh as a whole, with
dust on the upper surfaces fading to rusty iron elsewhere.
     The chair is CSG, with assorted dust textures applied on top of a
three-layer wood texture (complete with blistered varnish).  I rounded the
edges of the seat and back using some macros I wrote to simulate the use of a
router (Black & Decker, not IBM) on a board.  (I've included the router bits
include file and some sample scenes in the zip archive.)  The thick dust on the
seat was created by filling a thin prism the same shape as the top of the seat
with scattering media with a y-gradient density.  The dust bunnies are spheres
using a similar media with a spherical density.
     The window frame is more CSG, more wood textures, more dust.  The window
panes have a slightly wavy surface normal, like old glass, and (of course) a
layer of dust.  The forsythia bush outside the window was made with Gilles
Tran's MakeTree files from www.oyonale.com.  The curtain consists of a mesh
object built with POV SDL, by first calculating an array of points representing
the bottom edge, and then adding rows of triangles until there was enough
fabric to cover the window.  The fabric itself was created by rendering an
image of the same blue gingham texture as was used on the toy dog and then
uv_mapping it onto the curtain mesh.
     The picture frames are based on some antique frames in my mother's house. 
The guardian angel is a copy of a picture that hung on my bedroom wall a long,
long time ago (and also turned up both as a poster on the wall and as a dream
"bubble" in my "Dreamcatcher" IRTC entry).  The child in the oval-framed
picture is my mother.
     I used Photoshop to add the title, copyright, and email line, and to
convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (quality 11).