EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk NAME: Peter Murray TOPIC: The Wilderness INTERPRETATION: "Untouched and unseen by humans. Deep jungles, primal forests, rugged mountain tops, sunbaked deserts, boundless plains, isolated icecaps. Places where nature holds sway and man is unknown or insignificant." I didn't want to do one without people, so I decided to use the "Insignificant" approach. COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Another morning WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ COUNTRY: England RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: animal encyclopedia - Odhams Books 1964 Time-Life Books "Planet Earth: Underground Worlds" ISBN 0 7054 0745 4 Gilles Tran's Maketree macro (not actually in the final scene though) RENDER TIME: Total Time: 0 hours 39 minutes 29.0 seconds (2369 seconds) Time For Parse: 0 hours 0 minutes 11.0 seconds (11 seconds) Time For Trace: 0 hours 39 minutes 18.0 seconds (2358 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Another morning in the wilderness. The pregnant woman is fussed over by her mother and eldest child. The youngest child plays at being a hunter, with a piece of fur from a previous meal. His father watches, knowing it won't be as easy for him on today's hunt. The middle child watches the sun rising, and daydreams of making it stop in the sky, so that the children she expects to have won't have dark nights to scare them. She doesn't know that in the year they'll call 2000 AD, her descendants won't be able to do that, and won't want to. After all, they'll have electric light. She can't even imagine what they will have done - cut down all the trees outside the cave to deliberately grow other plants for food, hunted to the brink of extinction the animals that feed their tribe, mined away the hillside containing the cave just because of a shiny material in the walls, made the river undrinkable, and more. In her time, the wilderness is all there is, and humans are powerless and insignificant. To her, it seems more credible that people could stop the sun than do all those other things - because she can see the sun moves, and she can imagine that it might stop. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I had a dream which included a cave, and decided it might fit the topic for this round. After some hours thinking about it, I modelled the cave as a set of cylinders, and then converted them to blob{} components. Then I subtracted the blob from a box{} and modelled more cylinders to make a rock face the cave was in. When I turned the cylinders into another blob{}, it didn't look as good as I'd hoped. The next day, I moved the viewpoint into the cave, which worked better. I edited the cave until it looked more like my mental image of it, and worked out who was in the cave and what they were doing. Oh, and I lit a fire in the cave to keep the animals away. Since then, I've worked on the landscape outside. I worked on the clouds. (They're two planes textured with bozo.) I did more work on the river, which is CSG elements cut out of the plane that forms the ground level. The hills are composed of blob{} elements. I experimented with various textures, and then edited the results to match colour photos in an animal encyclopedia more closely. The cave texture was then revised based on the photos in the "Underground Worlds" book. I used various pictures (I forgot to note the sources) to find enough people to make up a family and scaled my "render test dummies" to match them. Then I costumed them in what seemed like reasonable cave people costumes, and rendered a test "family photo" to see them all. They were then added to the cave, and posed to match my original idea. I tried revising a macro I wrote for the Gardens round, to produce trees, but had a problem with a bug in it. So I downloaded Gilles Tran's Maketree macro and made some nice trees with that. However, the trees in this scene are so far away you wouldn't be able to see the details anyway, even if I had enough memory to #include them. I used the bounding boxes of the trees produced by the macro to make simpler tree substitutes and used those instead. The substitutes were much simpler; much much simpler :-) . I made a very sketchy mammoth and put some of them in the scene. But they were impossible to see, so I took them out again without ever getting them to look good. I made a simplified rook, which has more detail than the mammoth, and put five of them into the scene. You can't see the details, but the birds are at least visible :-) . This has been the most confusing IRTC entry (for me) that I've done. Moving the viewpoint inside the cave meant all my x and z coordinates were reversed from the way I normally have them. This really confused me when I was trying to position the cave people. Oh well... this entry doesn't have anything to do with the village setting I've been working on in previous rounds. I could claim that the village would be built near here in several thousand years time, but the point is, none of the modelling for the village was used for this scene.