EMAIL: ryanbennitt@lycos.co.uk
NAME: Ryan Bennitt
TOPIC: Complexity
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Shoots
COUNTRY: UK
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.6
TOOLS USED: Silo 1.4, Silo 2 beta, GIMP
RENDER TIME: Parse 33s, Render 9h11m0s
HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 3200+
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Nature is complex at every level, but every plant starts off with a small
shoot with two leaves. From something so seemingly simple, all manner of
complex plants can grow.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I started out with the idea of doing a close up of a patch of grass, but after
taking some close up photos from the garden, I noticed some small shoots in a
patch of earth that inspired me to try modelling a close up of shoots
sprouting from the earth.

Starting with an isosurface for the earth I randomly generated lots of small
stones over the entire area.

I then proceeded to model some shoots in Silo and converted these using a
plugin I wrote for exporting various POVRay primitives.

To add some contrast and scale I found some dead leaves, scanned them in,
edited them in GIMP and used Silo 2 to create deformed leaf meshes and UV map
the scanned image onto them.

Finally I experimented with focal blur to try giving the impression of close
up photography.