EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Burial
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/pshawpsoft/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray (started with 3.1, finished with 3.5)
TOOLS USED: Poser 4, Crossroads, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Paint Shop Pro, under Win 98
RENDER TIME: 41m 19s
HARDWARE USED: P2, 266 mhz, 96 mg, 4 mg video card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: They started west not long after the Revolution ended, past the new frontier settlements and the old French towns, till the forest met the tallgrass prairie.  Along the way, little Micah grew ill; the place where he died was the place they stayed, unwilling to leave his grave behind in trackless wilderness.  Ezekial carved his marker from a slab of oak; two years later, he carved another for baby Esther, who lived less than a day.  But their other children grew strong and tall, and moved on.  Last summer, Sarah found Ezekial slumped against the woodpile, one cold hand clutching his sunken chest.  It was all she could do to wrap his body in an old sheet and drag it down to the little graveyard, but she managed.  She'd go on managing, she told herself then.  She'd heard a few years back that this part of the Territory had become a state.  Surely folks would begin to come this way again.  Meanwhile, she could still grow a few hills of corn and beans and punkins, the crick was full of catfish, and she could chop dead wood for a fire.  And, above all, thank the Lord for this good old yeller dog to keep her company...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well, obviously, lots and lots of Gilles Tran's wonderful grass (and also a couple of trees)--visit www.oyonale.com and be filled with joy and awe.  Sarah is a Poser 4 figure, converted to POV with Crossroads.  The daisies between the grave markers came from some dang shareware flower-making program I used to have, a couple of hard-drive crashes ago, and I wish I remembered its name.  The chunks of chert, jasper, and other Missouri tiller-breakers began life as triangle-mesh spheres, which were then tweaked all out of shape with an ugly little sphere-tweaking macro.  The shovel is just CSG.  The graves and grave markers and the distant hills are height fields, drawn with PhotoDeluxe.  (Ol' Yeller's cross is two height fields nailed together.)  The sky is one of those ridiculously simple little things that actually happens to look kinda nice (SKS_Sunset.inc, included).
     About halfway through the project, I downloaded POV 3.5.  Oh, happy day--isosurfaces!  The split rails for the fence are wedges chopped out of a cylinder function and splintered and cracked with a stretched-out agate function.  S-L-O-W, but what fun!
     I used PhotoDeluxe to add the title, copyright, and URL lines, and PSP to convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (72 DPI, compression level 5).