EMAIL:cfusner@enter.net NAME:Charles Fusner TOPIC:Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: "Opportunity Passing..." COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.silvertome.com RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Moray, PSP, Poser, a custom perl script and a specialty POV macro. RENDER TIME: 31 min 38 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4, 1.6mhz with 512 megs RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "To the east, occasional lightning still flashed, but Jeffrey faced the other way. Ahead of him, it looked almost as if the sun might break through before sunset. It hardly mattered; Jeffrey barely noticed the sky anyway. "The dolphins were chattering at him again. They always seemed to sense when he was in these moods and seemed as though they were trying to cheer him up. Jeff ignored them too. Another time, perhaps, he would have appreciated their efforts, but not now. How could they understand his misery anyway? Afterall, this was *their* home..." --- DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Photorealism was not really the goal with this image. In fact, curiously enough, when I started, the idea I began with was much more surreal than this. It was only as I created it that I began altering the concept more and more. In fact, about the only thing it has in common with the original concept is the boy on the rock (and even he isn't where I would have originally put him!) However, as I began adding components, realizing what couldn't be made to work in time, and expanding the tale to tell the boy's past and hint at the present that was passing him by, I realized this was probably a better idea than the original concept anyway and concentrated on telling the tale of a boy stranded at sea in as much detail as I could fit in by the deadline. I could drone on about how every little thing was done, but I believe most readers of this text already could guess much of it. I've included a fully detailed log text in the zip file (look for scenelog.txt) for those who want to hear more anyway, but here are just the two most noteworthy points... THE BOY ON THE ISLAND ... (Triscan macro gets new shoes for 3.5) I got the pose for the boy by dusting of my old Triscan macro which had been made for MegaPOV and changing a line or two to make it POV 3.5 compatible. I made the thing originally to see if it could be done, but although I opined it should be useful for what I used it for here, this is the first time I actually did so in a project. Anyway, I triscanned a POV heightfield and then imported the result into Poser as a prop to position the boy. Then I tinkered with him for a while and finally converted him for import into POV and sat him on the original height field. The new version (slightly updated) of Triscan is available in the Packages section of my website. PERL MAKES THE SWEEPS ... (my other custom written utility). There are many different sphere_sweeps in this image. The obvious ones are the dangling lines from the mast of the sunken ship, and several each for the lightning bolts. There are also three fainter ones shaping smoke curling from the background ship's smoke stacks (although in the final image, it's mostly lost against the fog). It also allowed me to use photographs of real lightning to shape the sweeps for the lightning bolts. Moray does not yet have support for sphere_sweeps, although it's been discussed for future development, so I had to get creative. Fortunately, I'm also studying perl right now and needed a project to test my knowledge out on anyway. That's how sweepconvert.pl came to be. Basically, it parses out specially named spheres from a POV file and converts them into a UDO/INC pair that defines a declared sphere_sweep and a rudimentary collection of wireframe lines to stand in for it. This allows you to position control points in 3D space graphically using Moray, export that, and then convert it into a sweep that can be read back into your Moray scene file to position and test it. It's fairly primitive at the moment, but functional. I included a copy of the current edition and a quickstart guide to using it in the zip file, in case you have perl and are interested in trying it out. A slightly improved release may follow when I have time to add a few desperately needed features if there's any interest. -- Final note: Thanks to Thomas de Groot for his rowboat model on the Moray website. I didn't use it exactly, since it was a different style of row boat than I wanted, and I needed different textures as well. But it was a perfect starting point and showed me where I was going wrong on my own first efforts at a rowboat.