EMAIL: kevin@tapestry.tucson.az.us
NAME: Kevin Wampler
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:
COUNTRY: United States
RENDERER USED: Megapov 0.6a
TOOLS USED: HamaPatch, Java3D 
RENDER TIME: 12 days (estimated)
HARDWARE USED: Celeron 500 128MB, PentiumIII 600 256MB, Athalon 700 256MB, PentiumIII 700 128MB, PentiumIII 800

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	Two plants, both somewhat based on roses.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
At first I wasn't even planning on entering the competition.  Instead, I was working on creating a scene
from the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Mrs. Frisby outside of the Rats' rosebush).  Then I realized that
I might be able to submit it to the IRTC.  Since there was no way I was going to model a realistic enough mouse
by the submission deadline, and since that wouldn't fit the theme all that well, I decided it make the contras
between the thorn bush and a small flower.

The thorn bush was what I modeled first.  I spent a couple of days writing a program in Java to generate
gnarled thorn plants and export them to Pov.  I also used Java3D to preview the plants, which greatly sped up
the tweaking of the parameters.  Once I had finished the program, I exported a few plants into Pov include files
and placed them where I wanted them in the scene.  There are several thorn bushes in the scene.  The largest of them
is one huge blob, and the others are made of cones and cylinders (renders faster).  The texturing was done with the
help of John VanSickle's Reorient macro.

Next I modeled the flower in HamaPatch, and textured it.  I would like to thank Rune S. Johansen for his
fur texture, which I a used as a part of the texture for the petals of the flower.

Finally I modeled the ground, which is just an isosurface using the crackle pattern.

At this point I hit the biggest problem, rendering the thing.  The image needed radiosity, which sent render
time through the roof.  So, I rendered the image in sections (trying to do 25 rows a night) and got some of the
people in my dorm to help out with the rendering so it could be finished by the submission deadline.  Accordingly,
I would like to thank Shafik Amin, Gergely Kota, Steven Kobes and Andrew Crites for lending me their spare CPU
cycles, without them I would not have been able to finish this image on time.  I then took the sections completed
by different people and put them together using

I haven't included most of the thorn bushes in the source file, since they total almost 40 megs.