EMAIL: agage@mines.edu NAME: Aaron Gage TOPIC: Childhood COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Worlds COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.mines.edu/students/a/agage RENDERER USED: POVray 3.0 for Linux TOOLS USED: Terrain Maker RENDER TIME: 1h 31m 18s on a borrowed Compaq Pentium 200Mhz (40M RAM) HARDWARE USED: i486DX2/66 with 20 Megs RAM under Linux 2.0.28 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The world of the child and the world of the adult, while seen by some as the same place, are really quite different. The world as seen through a child's eyes is simple, colorful, and carefree. The world as seen by an adult, however, is burdened by responsibilities, fears, and toils. Strangely, the child wants nothing but to participate in the adult world, while the adult looks back and wonders where childhood has gone. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image isn't exactly how I envisioned it, but with the pressures I've had for this round, I could not spend the time needed to finish it. I basically spent the first few weeks trying to come up with a good terrain. I discovered early on that Terrain Maker was going to be the only way to get the gorge/rift effect I wanted, but I had trouble getting the cleft to disappear without simply vanishing. Another major problem was getting the two halves lined up such that both sides has enough space to really show anything. Terrain Maker is a very good program -- while it is my policy to use only those objects and tools which I have made myself, the two exceptions that I will gladly use are Terrain Maker and Sonya Robert's tree creator. The terrain shown is made up of two primary heightfields, one on either side of the ravine, plus one at a distance behind the "childhood" side for some depth (and to smooth the horizon). The gaps have been filled in with some CSG planes, so the reflections of the terrain do not get cut off. The child side was given a surface normal of granite, which when viewed at a distance, could pass for grass. The sky effect is fairly straightforward, basically taking an existing sky sphere and adding an X gradient. I am particularly happy with the way the sky changes color. The buildings are simple CSG. The idea for the adult side was to use very angular, square, plain structures. The green building was inspired by the Emerald City in Sacramento, and the black building beside it is just a miscellaneous office tower. The windows are just tiled onto the sides of the buildings using a loop. The background of buildings is composed of a couple of rows of buildings in the distance with random variations on height and location. The candy-cane gazebo was made up of a number of pieces, none of which were too hard to do. The canes themselves are just cylinders with a rotated gradient texture -- it only looks like a spiral because you cannot see the side. The hook part of the canes are just tori with a radial pattern, cut in half for their shape. Getting the stripes to line up (so the red stripe is seemingly continuous all the way around the candy cane) was really just good luck. The trick was basically to keep changing the angle of rotation of the texture on the lower part until the angle of the topmost spiral blended itself satisfactorily into the beginning of the torus. The base of the gazebo is just a superellipsoid with a radial texture, and the little seats are just smaller superellipsoids with a spiral1 texture. The orange ball (some kind of hard candy, I suppose) is positioned very carefully to just touch the candy canes, and the blue disk is yet another torus. I had originally intended to use a gingerbread house for that part of the image, but decided that A) I didn't know what it should look like, and B) it would probably end up being too angular. The gazebo is far larger than the house would have been, but I am somewhat satisfied with the results (though it does seem a wee bit distracting). The butterfly did not take long to make. The wings are discs, which have been textured with a bozo pattern of reds and oranges and yellow, and finished with a granite normal. The body is made up of a few scaled spheres (and cylinders for the antennae). The crows (ravens?) on the right side of the image (between the buildings) are also very simple. The wings were made through CSG of cylinders, and the body is just an elongated sphere. What looks like a tail or feet is actually just an extension of the wings, no extra object, but it looked good so I left it. The people are almost exactly identical, minus scale and attire. The head is a sphere, with a CSG sphere (and X-gradient texture) for hair. The shoulders, body, arms, and legs are a set of superellipsoids. The time I had to finish this scene and the atmosphere that it ended up with basically lent a surreal impression to the scene. The scales aren't exactly right on, and there are a few places where I wanted to add more detail but could not (such as hands and feet on the people, etc.). The image, as is, requires a little more creative license to convey its message, since I had originally meant to have both sides as realistic as possible. This submission is basically the point when I ran out of time. The entire source for an /earlier/ version of this image is in the accompanying zip file. The only difference is that the files in the archive do not include the road on the adult side (since I created the archive before I was totally done with the image).