EMAIL: angela_s_perry@yahoo.com NAME: Angela Perry TOPIC: Music COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Birth of Inspiration COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 1.2.1 TOOLS USED: sPatch, Photoshop 7.0 (for image maps and jpg conversion), POVRay 3.6 RENDER TIME: 2hr 3min 47sec @ 1200X600 pixels HARDWARE USED: Pentium D 2.8GHz, 200GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Music and inspiration are, for me, nearly synonymous. Whether I'm writing or drawing or programming a computer, music helps me do it creatively and with more insight. Thus, it only makes sense that Inspiration be born of music. I tossed around several ideas, but I am forever drawn to fantastical settings. Thus, the Queen of the Fairies uses her magical harp to create the tiny fairy Inspiration deep in the Enchanted Forest. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image contains a lot of personal firsts: a human (as a species, we are such a nuisance to model!), media (though you can hardly see it *sigh*), and the marvelous new spline feature. Here's a challenge...see if you can pick out all the splines in the image ;-) And POV team, if you happen to read this, the spline feature is awesome! Yay! No more macros of Catmull-Rom splines to program! Fairies: One of my goals in POV-Ray is to create a free, posable, realistic human model that would be widely available to whoever wanted it. It's my little protest to overpriced modelling software (whose name we shan't mention but which rhymes with Hoser ;-) I tried blobs, CSG, hand-created bicubic patches... But, much as I hate to use external tools, sPatch was just the only thing that gave me the result I wanted. Thus, the two fairies are version 0.1 of my sPatch human model. Yeah, the hair stinks...I'm working on that... The little inspiration fairy leaves a trail of spline-controlled glows, a wonderful feature of MegaPOV that I desperately wish would be included in the official version. Glows are so terrific for so many things! And they are very, VERY difficult to reproduce using media (at least for me). However, the glows seem to have a few minor bugs still... (I vent below.) The Wings were painted in Photoshop and saved as PNG files, then mapped to objects. The large wings use the alpha channel to make boxes partially transparent, but the small wings were a bit of a pain. Apparently, glows don't work so good with the alpha channel, and strange shadows and artifacts kept appearing when I mapped the small wings to a box. Finally, I modelled wings in sPatch and mapped to them, which solved the shadowy weirdness with the glows. Harp: The harp is simple CSG and some lovely cubic splines using POVRay's new spline feature. Nothing much more to say. You can see the details in the ZIP file. Environment: I made extensive use of Gilles Tran's MakeGrass and MakeTree macros to green things up in the forest. All of the trees, bushes, and grass is solely to his credit. The flowery morning glory vines in the foreground are a macro I created using splines. Leaves or flowers are randomly placed along the vine, which is a sphere sweep. The ferns are sphere sweep/mesh combos created with a macro. The rocks are height fields, and the leaf and stone litter on the forest floor are simply randomly selected and positioned meshes and scaled spheres. The biggest disappointment to me in this image is the media. I had some wonderful slanting sunbeams in this image, but when I rendered the final version with high sampling and intervals, it hardly showed up at all. And being the procrastinator that I am, I didn't have time to fiddle with the image to make it show up better. So, pretend there are lovely slanting sunbeams, okay? :-D Overall: This is not my favorite image I've ever done. I am disappointed in the media, some of the textures, and the ferns (which, by the way, should have been prolific, but because of something I did wrong, ate my memory for lunch. 2 gigs of RAM, phht! gone in 5 minutes just from fern creation. Urgh.) But, it was a great learning experience. And I am very much looking forward to useful feedback!