EMAIL: rjhansen@hotbot.com
NAME: RJay Hansen
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Sunrise
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.2540dpi.f2s.com
RENDERER USED: MacMegaPov 0.5
TOOLS USED: Adobe Illustrator, Pixels3D, EPStoPOV, dxfPR, Mondfarilo, Adobe Photoshop 
RENDER TIME: Parse: 17.0 seconds Trace: 36 minutes 51.0 seconds

HARDWARE USED: Power Macintosh 7200/75, 88MB RAM for most of the modeling and test renders.

Power Macintosh G4 400, 256MB RAM for the final rendering and some of the modeling.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Lost in the desert, traveling at night to avoid the daytime heat, I ate some small, bitter cacti I found. As dawn came, I witnessed a sunrise unlike any I had ever seen.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image started when I began experimenting with dxfPR, a DXF to POV-Ray converter. To my knowledge there has never been a reliable version of such a converter available on the Macintosh platform. This program, written as a Java application  by Yasunari Iwanaga, recently came to my attention, and I wanted to try out. One of the first objects I tried making was one of the cacti, and about that time I saw the topic for the IRTC and decided to create a whole scene for it.

The ground is one large box with narrower, lighter-colored boxes alternated across its surface using MacMegaPov's Multicopy.

The mountain range was painted in Photoshop and saved as a Targa file to use as a  height field object.

The pyramids are iso-surfaces. I created a bump map for their texture in Photoshop.

The prickly pear cactus was modeled in Mondfarilo, a wire-frame modeler which handles POV-Ray primitives and writes out POV-Ray files. It is just a bunch of scaled, flattened spheres.

The saguaro cacti were done by drawing a rib in Adobe Illustrator. I then imported this into Pixels3D, a NURBS based modeling/rendering program. It was step and repeated to create a skeleton of the trunk for lofting. After lofting, the top was pinched shut. The resulting cactus trunk was exported as a DXF file. I then imported this into dxfPR to get a (big) triangle mesh include file. This process was repeated with a scaled down copy of the rib to create the cactus arm. I then assembled a couple of cacti in POV-Ray from the two triange mesh include files.

The sun's body is a sphere (obvious statement). The eyelids were done in Pixels3D and run through dxfPR. The eyeballs are spheres with a texture map done with Photoshop. The rays were created by drawing the outer shape in Illustrator and saving it as an EPS file. EPStoPOV is a Mac program which takes an EPS file and creates a POV lathe or prism from it. I used this to create a prism. The hole in the middle is  a difference with a sphere.

Back to Pixels3D to create the fish. This is the most complex organic 3D model I have yet attempted and it took the most time of anything in the scene to model (I spent about two weeks on it). I used Pixels3D's IK features to give the fish the arcing, jumping shape. dxfPR was run on the resulting DXF file to get POV-Ray triangle mesh files. These were then textured in POV-Ray with a Photoshop bump map applied for scales. Although it has room for improvement, I was generally happy with it, and learned a lot with this exersize, including the fact that I spent a lot of time on a lot of detail which can't be seen in the final rendering, due to the relatively small size of the fish.

The ripples under the fish are cylinders with a ripple normal.

With the main light source needing to come from the direction of the sun, I found lighting the scene kind of tricky. I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with different supplemental lights and intensities, before I settled on the final setup.

My final verdict on dxfPr is it works as advertised. Being a Java program it should run on any platform with Java support although the author has only tested it on a Mac. The downside to it is DXF files converted to POV-Ray triangle meshes tend to produce huge files! It took my 75mhz home machine about two minutes to parse the scene with all the objects in it, so making final tweaks and doing test renders became tiresome. Obviously I should be selective about when and where I use these files.