EMAIL: tina@ripco.com
NAME: Tina S.
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION TITLE: Threshold
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.1
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (height fields, image conversion)
Gilles Tran's makeTree macros
Jeff Lee's bricks.inc

RENDER TIME: 45 min, 4 seconds (26:05 parsing time) - 91855 objects
HARDWARE USED: P2 150MHz/32M RAM - P2 266 MHz/96M RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The old man watched the car drive out of sight as he puffed absently
on his pipe. He shook his head and addressed the dog, "Seemed like
such a nice fellow. Guess he didn't take an old guy like myself
seriously, but he was polite enough about it." The dog's ears
pricked up slightly, but he otherwise didn't move. Neither, for a
while, did the man.

Time passed and day eventually wended its way to sunset. The old
man told the story half a dozen times to locals who stopped for
gas. "I guess maybe he thought I was crazy, and I s'pose I can't
really blame him," he said to the dog as he began locking up. He
looked up towards the hills. "Fog's comin' in." The dog growled
softly, and the man looked back towards him. "Not much I can do.
Can't rightly go up there. You'd have no one to feed you. And I
did warn him."

As he shut the doors tight and checked the shutters on the windows,
he added, "Guess I just hope it won't be coming down out of the
hills and into town. Too late for anything else." The dog settled
in under the kitchen table as the man made supper, muttering to
himself about city boys who think they know everything, alternating
with wishing there were anything he could do to save the newcomer's
life. "His family always was stubborn," he concluded, and sat down
to wait for some news.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Unfortunately, I did not get the idea for this picture until
mid-September. My original idea for the horror round -- thought up
back in March -- was discarded when I realized I just didn't have
the skill or tools to pull it off. This image itself does not
contain all the elements I would have put in it if I'd had more
time for it. In part, the reason it's technically unfinished is
because I had several weeks of extreme high work-related stress
that resulted in my being a couch potato rather than an artist of
any sort. However, I felt since I had the basic scene, and all the
/important/ elements, it was still worth entering, if nothing else
for the feedback.

The scene was basically created in three parts: the house, the
outdoorsy stuff, and the tentacles. I plotted the house out on
paper as if I were going to render the whole thing in detail,
although since most of it wasn't going to be visible, only the
nearest rooms contain any furniture (fairly roughly done). With
the sole exception of the light above the door and the (non-visible)
attic portion, the house is composed of, basically, lots and lots
of boxes.

The outdoorsy stuff basically is four things: grass, trees, and
lawn furniture. The trees I made with the utterly wonderful makeTree
macro, and the leaves on the ground are from two of the trees I
made with it. It took me a while to get them the size and shapes
I wanted, but I'm overall absolutely stunned how easy this made my
work. There are a total of 9 trees, the three least complex of
which are repeated in the background.

The hills in the background are, of course, height fields. The
grass was also composed of height fields. Using the "random noise"
option in PSP, I made speckled images, one sparse, one full, and
then combined them using my new favorite tool, the #while loop.

The lawn furniture was actually the first thing created, and is a
set of (relatively) simple CSG objects: toruses (torii?) and
cylinders. At one point I was considering making it that faux
wrought iron black you sometimes see in lawn furniture but decided
that in a night scene it would work out better if it were white.

The tentacles are, of course, blob objects. I realize they appear
to be conjured out of thin air... but you have no idea what lives
underground in this fictional world... and I don't think you want
to. The original concept for the picture involved a total of 4 or
5 tentacles but I changed my mind. I may change it back again at
some point.

There are six different light sources, but hopefully the image will
not be too bright. I say "hopefully" because, although the friend's
machine I did the final scene on (which is why there are two hardware
profiles listed) was faster, my video card is way, way better, and
I happen to know that one of the difficulties with his machine is
that the light levels and gamma correction in general are definitely
darker than usual. I'm afraid I might have overcorrected for it.
I'm sure someone will let me know, if so.

Aside from the bricks texture, which although I chose the colors
was, of course, someone else's texture statements, all textures
are mine.

I made my friend's computer crash trying to render the scene, until
we increased virtual memory. Oops. I think I shall avoid many-tree
images in the future until such time as I get a way, way better
machine. 91000 objects scares me.

I did not include the source code because it was, well, huge, and
I'm impatient.