EMAIL: marihugh7@cs.com
NAME: James R. L. Hughes
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: But I make kittens
COUNTRY: USA
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Gimp, Irfanview, Wings 3D, Moray, AccuTrans 3D, Poseray,
            Poser 4, UVmapper, Blender 2.7
RENDER TIME: 40 minutes 17 seconds
HARDWARE USED: AMD duron 950 khtz / 256 Mb. Ram / 1.6 gig hard drive

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

You want margarine? But I Make Kittens! Is there happiness in slavery?

This is my first complete 3D image, so go easy on me :D
It either very artistic and deeply symbolic, or, utter nonsence. Either
way its kinda nifty imho. My concern is that its too obvious, and not
surrealistic enough. But then again, im insane. misc note: The
skys are watching (look closely). 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Mount Saint Helens:
 The volcano is part of the landscape I was raised in. 
I got the digital elevation map from the USGS site, and converted it with
AccuTrans. Then I downloaded sixteen tiles of orthographic sattelite photos
from terraserver, and stitched them together. I used the gimp, and irfanview
to enhance the contrast and gamma of the mountian skin, and to make all
the tiles look right (some of them were very bright). Finally, i used
UVmapper to UVmap the mountain, and exported a map, and put the satelite
photo onto the obj, then loaded it all up in poseray, and exported to
povray. I had to do this at a very high res because i have no way of
smoothing the mountain faces. (it was too large to load in anything that
could apply smoothing, and i have no idea how to do that by hand).

Sky:
 There are two skies. One is a skysphere with a procedural texture, used
for the reflections in the water. The other, is a cube with a texture map
that I made on it. 

Actors:
 The drowning man and the woman are created in poser. The robot, I modeled
in blender. I then exported each of his body parts, converted them from
dxf to obj using accutrans. Then I loaded them into Wings 3D, smoothed them
and exported them again. Then I loaded them into UVmapper, Mapped them,
and then exported them. Then I used the Gimp to create bump and texture
maps. Then, I loaded them into poseray, tweaked the materials a bit, and 
exported to povray format *whew!*. Finally, I loaded the resulting body 
parts into moray, and peiced the robot back together, and posed him. The
drill and apple were created seperately, but in the exact same way, 
except for the little white spot where the drill bit is peircing the
apple. Thats a disc with a procedural texture on it.

Special Note:
 You can't see it as well as i'd hoped, but the 'knees' of the robot are
extremely convincing brushed aluminum. I thought i'd shortly describe how
I made them, even though its a 2d process, incase someone else wants to. 
In gimp, I used a repeating gradient that goes from black to white to black
to white, etc. In gimp the predefined gradient is called 'four bars' I used
it with a sawtooth wave repeat.  Then, i added about 15% of noise (not independant). Then use filter -> distorts -> wind. Set it to wind/left/
both. Strength and threshold should be equal, but change in value based
on the size of your texture. for a 256x256 ,use 2 and 2. 
 Thats it. the result is truly breathtaking on a cylender. 
For cones ,scan a CD.Invert, and add noise. Then use the blur - 
motion blur - radial. I used that on the cone of my drill. It looked
great. Sadly, the apple blocks it. Note this looks terrible if you
try to animate it though. rotating the texture proportional to 
light/camera movement helps, but if you zoom in or out you loose 
the effect, which , is why i lost the effect on the robots knees.

Dog Leash:
 The collar is a flatened torus with double conically shaped superquadratics
round it. The handle is a bezier patch. the chain is chris colefax's macro.

Deep Blue:
 The ocean was the toughest part, and is the part I am least satisfied with.
I looked around for a short bit to find some kind of ocean generator. Haha.
I ended up making an image map of some waves, using povray. Then, i created
and image map of some ripples, using povray. Then, I loaded both bitmaps
into the gimp and blended them together, and saved them as a tga. Then I
took some vacation photos and cut out the ocean from them, and made a 
pathetic texture map (which had the effect of making things look a bit
smoother although i think the whitecaps got swallowed up somewhere). Then
I created a hightfield, put the image map on it, and put a granite normal
on it (for reflections, and added noise). I had to use granite because
the heightfield was HUGE. 

The Rest:
 The rest of the scene consists of an area light, a point light, a 
camera, four layers of ground fog, and my signature heightfield
(in the low right corner).

Post processing:
 I used the Gimp to save the file to a jpg (cause it does such a
good job of it) Then I used irfanview to take the gamma down a bit,
and very slightly modify contrast and brightness. 

Source File:
 the source zip is 29.5 megabytes. At best, it would have taken me
eight hours to upload (my modem is slooow). So, if anyone wants
any part of the scene, like say, the mountain, or ocean, just email me. 
i'll zip that part and email it.