TITLE: Beamed Up
NAME: Stig M. Valstad
COUNTRY: Norway
EMAIL: svalstad@sn.no
WEBPAGE: http://www.sn.no/~svalstad/
TOPIC: Art and Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: beamed.jpg
ZIPFILE: beamed.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Polyray v1.8 for Linux

TOOLS USED: 
    Ted, dem2pov, hf-lab

RENDER TIME: 
    1h 12m 9s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix 6x86 110Mhz, 48 MB EDO RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I planned to skip this round, but then I saw a reply from
Jerry Anning to someone who had jokingly complained to the
irtc-l that he couldn't submit a landscape for the current
topic. Mr Anning suggested creating a landscape and putting
easel, palette, canvas, and brushes in the foreground.

That's what triggered my idea; an easel with a canvas
depicting a landscape with a UFO, and painting equipment
scattered about. The artist has been beamed up into the
UFO. (That way I didn't have to model hir.)

Oh yeah, and the ground in the foreground is covered in
moss, not grass.

The zip file includes full source and the painting on the
easel in .jpg format (576x320). The only height field
included is the hill in the foreground, the rest are
available from ftp://edcftp.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/DEM/250/


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All source is hand-coded using Ted for Linux.

I started converting loads of DEM files to tga format, test-
rendering them to find the perfect landscape. The hill in
the foreground is made in hf-lab and added to avoid visible
triangles. I tried using smooth_height_field, but then the
mountains looked plasticky.

Having found the perfect landscape and the perfect views of
that landscape, one view for us and one for the painter, I
made the UFO and rendered the artist's view for putting on
the canvas. Then I started making the different objects; the
easel, the paint tubes, the brushes and the palette, all
made of CSGing simple primitives, only the palette was a
bit tricky. All the objects were made one by one and then
moved into the main scene.

While adding the last objects I also worked on perfecting the
lighting. I think I spent more time on the lighting for this
scene than for any previous raytracing I've made.