EMAIL: danroot@juno.com
NAME: Daniel Root
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION
COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Ship in a Bottle
COUNTRY: U.S.
WEBPAGE: members.tripod.com/danielroot
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1 (unregistered), Spatch, Paint Shop Pro 5 (for mug text only)
RENDER TIME:15 hours 28 minutes 48 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Cyrix 686 200Mhz w/72MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
   
  With child's twinkle in my eye
  I stare at my ship
  I have sailed cross time
  To distant lands and men
 
  Yet "dragons live forever
  But not so little boys"
  What once my valiant St. Mary
  Sleeps at bay upon my desk

  But a shimmer of gold upon her deck
  Recalls ancient treasures found
  Perhaps little boys live forever
  To sail to distant lands and men

  Cross time and imagined seas
  And so in my imaginary world 
  I stare at my ship
  With child's twinkle in my eye
   ~~~~~
     
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Starting, of course with the idea, I sought first to make what I thought would be the hardest part-
the ship.  I'd seen some pretty good things coming from SPatch, so I gave it a whirl.  It worked
like a charm and in a few days' spare time I had a ship and a bottle and a cork.  

But where to put my new creation? I decided it was time to check out the new Moray and spent
time trying to figure out the new Inverse Kinematics so I could make a nice gooseneck lamp and
desk scene.  It took a little doing, but I finally figured out how to make a lamp that didn't twist up
into a garbled knot when I moved the light. The trick is low dampen values under the rotate
section.  This is a pain when you have to set values for 40 little "vertabrae." The lightbulb is a
point light plopped in the center of a shadowless, translucent sphere.  A slightly reflective finish
on a brown color made the thing look exactly like the one by my bed.

A simple plane would work for the desktop, and Moray's texture editor let me whip up a wood
texture for it. Still, something was missing.  The mug with a pen and magnifying glass worked out
to break up the remaining space.  Caustics on a clear flattened sphere worked for the lens.  The
mug is simply an image map with slight reflection put on for a glazed look.  As a side note, the
phrase "art is alive," is used for several reasons, one of which is to reject the late 20's Dada
movement's claim "art is dead."   

I pondered something in the background, like a window, but decided the negative space worked,
and helped lead the eye in a nice curve.  Anything else would be too busy. 

Back in Pov-Ray I fine tuned positions and scales, put in refraction and caustics.  I let the thing
render while I slept and in the morning I would figure out what I needed to do to fix it. This, it
turned out, was the hardest part, simply because every change took at best half an hour to see,
using a tiny 80x60 render. More subtle changes, I needed a 10 hour render. After making sure it
worked compositionaly, and that all the materials were where I wanted them, I let it do it's final
render.