EMAIL: veijo.vilva@animal.helsinki.fi
NAME: Veijo Vilva
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT

TITLE: Desolation

COUNTRY: Finland
WEBPAGE: http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1g
TOOLS USED: NONE
RENDER TIME: ~12h
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The image is a rather complex one and different people can read quite
different things from it. It depicts the mental landscape of a lonely
person living tightly enclosed within her mind, creating things only
for herself, rather like Father McKenzie writing sermons no one will
hear. She is hidden behind her persona, her public face, a prisoner
of this persona, which feels like a crown of thorns. Behind the visor,
there are further barriers preventing anyone from entering her mind,
seeing the real her. Like the gallant knight in Poe's Eldorado she has
grown old searching for her own Eldorado, Companionship, which keeps
eluding like a mirage. And when she one day almost reaches her goal,
the earth is ripped asunder across her path, an insurmountable abyss
opens preventing any further progress, and the world around her feels
like the Waste Land of T. S. Eliot:

  [...]
  If there were water we should stop and drink
  Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
  Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
  If there were only water amongst the rock
  Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot
      spit
  Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
  There is not even silence in the mountains
  But dry sterile thunder without rain
  There is not even solitude in the mountains
  [...]

The eye, the soul, can find neither rest nor peace in the desolation,
everything seems fractally bleak to an infinite depth.

The fellow tower, her Eldorado, is visible through a layer of shimmering
air, like a mirage or an oil painting complementing the 3D drawing on the
easel. The symbolic images populating her mind are not in scale, the window
is quite near the floor so one has to bend down in order to see out. Only
the thorny cage of the persona, the Waste Land of eternal loneliness, the
abyss and the mirage are visible through the window. All the things she
has created have petrified, are like a marble tombstone, inaccessible and
useless. The inner shell with the golden spikes somehow reminds me of the
self-wrought armour of Iorek Byrnison the panserbjorn, who is always alone
without a daemon to share the world with him.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

All the visual effects have been built with lights and height fields objects.

Most of the lights are spotlights:

  - the Sun is a dim, rather wide area spotlight
  - there are three main spotlights in each tower (the lamps).
  - in addition, there are two spotlights in the front tower
    to selectively illuminate the interior

Four distant and very wide arealights are used for ambient lightning.
The top of the ridge at the upper right corner of the image is actually
illuminated by the light escaping from the lamps of the front tower.
The light escaping through the windows of the towers forms tracks in
the upper part of the terrain. The overall lightning was adjusted so
that shadows are very soft and diffuse, e.g. within the cage and behind
the towers. The abyss, of course, must remain very dark to be effective.
The use of suitable spotlights within the front tower creates a sense
of dusk despite the surrounding day.

Bozo height field objects were used for several purposes:

  - the ground consists of two different height field objects,
    a smoother one and a very dense and peaky one which was positioned
    so that mostly the peaks penetrate the first, upper one.
  - the abyss was formed by differencing the ground and a two-sided
    height field object which was suitably rotated ( <40,15,0> ).
    This operation more than tripled the rendering time!
  - the tiles used for the walls of the towers are also height
    field objects. The outer tiles of the front tower are made of
    T_Silver_5C and the inner tiles of T_Chrome_2C. The reflective
    but uneven texture catches some of the surroundings creating
    a rather interesting, radiosity-like effect. The edges of the
    outer tiles are more natural than if normals would have been
    used. The thickness of the wall was chosen so that the inner
    tiles fuse together forming a seamless surface, though a very
    slightly uneven one due to random displacement of the tiles.
  - the mirage-like shimmering at the upper left corner of the image
    is created with a thin, transparent bozo sheet of {ior 1.05}.
    The sheet has been rotated -30*y to avoid a step at the horizon.
    The shimmering looks rather natural as the magnitude of the effect
    depends on the distance between the sheet and the object seen
    through it -- this effect would be quite difficult to achieve
    with post-processing.

Rather than using an image map of a real iris for the eye, I decided
to design an iris using pigment maps. The pigment map of the Mandel iris
uses two bozo pigments for the outer areas. This has a marginal effect
at lower resolutions but is quite necessary at the full projected
resolution.

I had to use a rather limited set of methods as the rendering time
is already rather long, and I intend to render the image at 7620x5080
in order to print it at 254dpi (30x20in). For that size, the estimated
rendering time is of the order of one month!

More views of the design are available at

  http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/gallery/desolation/