TITLE: Sand Garden with Limes
NAME: Rodney Byman
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: rbyman@rockies.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Ridge/6532
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rbgarden.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch,
            Terrain Maker, 
            Blobmaster,
            Gilles Tran's maketree macro,
            L-system
            3dWin,
            Moray

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours, 31 min.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350 with 64 megs ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


          Sand Garden With Limes
  
The first sure sight, after you've passed
through the uncertainty of dark pines,
are the monstrous limes--
veritable hippos of fruit.
                           "Surely,"
you think, "this is no more than ordinary statuary,"
You think, "They had weird gods, but
I've heard of weirder.
But the limes are real.
The scent of them is there
unmistakeably,all around you. It forces
you beyond your doubt with the strength
of memory. It speaks to the back of your brain.
You realize reality is a stranger to you
in this place.
               You notice
the sand. It is all colours, filling in 
all the blanks you never noticed before
in the rainbow. And it shines.
It hurts your eyes and makes you dizzy
until you cry out, "What wealth, what
splendour, what awful beauty!"
                               If you left now,
all would be well. But the place
presses itself on you like a purring cat.
It won't let you go. You wander,
dwarfed by limes, through the garden.
Your hand reaches out. Your fingers
brush the waxy, pockmarked surface
of a lime. Once, you stop. You rest both hands,
palms flat, on a lime. You feel its silence,
sense its cool gravity.
In the space between limes
you get the feeling you are walking on light.
You can't shake it.
                    Finally it comes to you--
as something will
in a dream--the thing you looked for there
and in other places.
                      You say,
"This is the promised land. Here things are
as they are. There are no lies here. No storms
can enter in. The precision of this landscape
is inevitable and pure...."


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I could never finish the poem to my satisfaction and now it seems I'll never be
able to finish the picture to suit me. Oh well, on to technical matters. The
cat, the limes and the 
the cut out for the stream were done in my own Blobmaster. The woman was
modelled in sPatch.
The pines are all copies of a single model generated by L-System4, saved as a
.dxf file and then converted to a POV file with 3dwin. The background hills are
a height field done in Terrain maker. The base for the sand was done in Terrain
maker as well.I wrote a routine to create a seamless strip 20 tiles wide and 2
deep  and then created an object consisting of ten of these strips. This was
subtracted from the base box to give the sand texture. The deciduous tree used
as a frame was done with Gilles Trans maketree utility. The sunset is the
result of hours of experimentation with media inside a huge sky shell made of
the difference between to spheres. The texture for the background hills was
made with Moray's texture editor as was the texture for the log bridge. The
limes are all randomly placed in a while loop with some hocus-pocus to ensure
that none of them intersect with each other nor do any of them end up floating
above or damming the stream. Have a look at the source for details. The source
is available at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Ridge/6532