EMAIL: mandl@vienna.at
NAME: Marianne Mandl
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Before dinner
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows, version 3.1g
TOOLS USED: Spatch, Moray
RENDER TIME: parsing: 1 h 20 min;  rendering: 42 hours (lots of anti-aliasing).
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 450
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
I live in a flat and I would love to have a garden, so I enjoyed fabricating one which is sunny, private, tidy and easy to keep. I have then allowed myself to sit in there before dinner with a glass of Chateau Margaux.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The plants
All the plants, except for the hedge are made using a recursive macro which is copied and modified for each plant. This applies to the trees, the fern, the flowers and the grass. 

The hedge and the grass
The hedge was made by filling a cubic area with leaves placed and oriented at random. The shape of the hedge which was made out of CSGs was then paved with that cube and used as a clipping region. To avoid having a repeating pattern of leaves, due to the regular paving, the cube was rotated and reflected at random each time. The grass was done similarly.

Using meshes of triangles
To save memory and parsing time, the grass, the leaves and the 'ropes' hanging from the weeping willow, which were first modelled with CSGs, were later replaced by meshes of triangles. These approximate (very roughly) the primitives.

The spray of water
Lots of small spheres on parabolic trajectories with a water texture borrowed from Moray. A small random displacement which increases with the distance travelled is added. 

The ground
The soil under the grass is a height field generated by Pov-Ray using one of the normal patterns.

Man made objects
The furniture, the pipe and the wall are made with CSGs. The cushion was made by Spatch while the wine was provided by Moray.

The lighting
There are 3 lights which are given the same reddish color. Two are shadowless and are used to give ambient light.

ZIP file
It contains all the povray code. To save space, 2 tga files were left out (height field for the ground and tile image map).