EMAIL: djhouy@paw.za.org
NAME: Derrick J Houy
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Night Scape
COUNTRY: South Africa
WEBPAGE: http://www.houy.za.org/

RENDERER USED:
    Povray 3.6

TOOLS USED:
    jPatch 3.0
    Blender 2.36
    DAZ Studio
    PoseRay
    GIMP
    KPovModeler
    PAWed

    Lightsys4  by Jaime Vives Piqueres
    Isowood3 by Christoph Hormann

    Canon G3 Camera

RENDER TIME:
    18 hours on Pentium III 850

HARDWARE USED:
    Various, depending where I was at any given time.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Who is she, why is she here, at this time of night? Is she lonely, or
just so totally at peace with herself that she doesn't need anyone? Is
she afraid, of people, the sun maybe? She looks content, and yet so alone.
Perhaps she has been working too hard, and cannot wait a second longer to
begin a holiday, or perhaps she is at the end of one and cannot let go.
As much as she makes an interesting addition to the scenery on this beautiful
night, she seems so out of place.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Firstly, this is my first complete rendering, so I have had to learn a lot
in a very short space of time--I only decided to enter the competition toward
the end of January. I think I have learned more from those who have gone before
me than I can possibly teach anyone else, but I hope someone can extract
something useful from my work.

The scene was composed in KPovModeler, using a lot of props and low-res meshes.

The pier was originally constructed of basic primitives, but I could not get
a decent texture working there, and so ended up using Christoph's Isowood3.

The lamp posts and ladder are simple CSG with a very simple texture. The banners
are bicubic patches with a simple texture made in GIMP. The strings tying the
banners to the posts are sphere sweeps, but were a total waste of time modeling,
since they cannot actually be seen--forcing them to be visible ruins the effect.2

The tyres and row-boat were created in jPatch, and cleaned up in Blender. The
boat hooks and sail boat were modeled totally in Blender. I created the bump map
texture for the tyre treads in GIMP. I did model a better tyre with more realistic
treads, but it was too late to include in the final render.

Poseray was used to convert the Blender models to Povray meshes.

The rope, what little you can see of it, is a sphere sweep with a texture I
created that does not look too great close up, but seems to serve the purpose
for this picture.

The moon was created with LightsysIV, with the actual moonlight coming from a
lightsource placed much lower to get the relection on the water. This, and the
lamp post lights provide the only global lighting, with one other light which
only affects the moon itself.

The water is a simple disk with a water texture added to it, and I used a layer
of fog to soften it up a bit at the horizon and in the distance.

The girl and her flip-flops come from DAZ studio, converted using Poseray. I
originally used a Blobman girl, but she ruined the mood of the scene.

Her towel is a bicubic patch with a picture of my own beach towel from Mauritius
mapped onto it.

The sources exclude all the big messes (with low-res version in their place, the sail
boat and the image map for the towel, the girl being replaced with a Blobman girl.

I could see that the final render would not finish on time, so the submitted picture
is rendered at a much lower quality.

I still wanted to create a realistic star map, as seen from the sky where I live,
and add a lot more detail to the picture, as well as soften the edges of the moon,
but time has finally run out. I only hope that you all enjoy the picture as much
as I have enjoyed creating it, and that you can capture at least a little of the
mood I have tried to create.