TITLE: Sammy NAME: David Bowers COUNTRY: U.S.A EMAIL: CyberDab@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/dbowers3_14/ TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: SPatch and Chris Colfax's Lens Flare plugin for POV-Ray RENDER TIME: Aproximately 2 hours HARDWARE USED: 233 MHZ pentium 64M RAM,scanner for image maps IMAGE DESCRIPTION: There has been a recent rain. Small drops of dew cling to tuffs of grass. As Sammy peers down into the murky water of a recently formed mud puddle he notices a subtle white reflection flicker in the water. He looks up just in time to see a speckled butterfly come in for a landing just above him. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: One of things I felt was important for this scene was that it should appear to be part of a larger world. I did not want it to look "staged". I wanted the scene to imply that if you could walk around within it there would actually be something to see. This meant that I had to make effective use of negative space. I used a plane with a scanned image of clouds and a grass field as a backdrop. This helped create the illusion of having a larger world. It did create one problem though. The area where the backdrop plane intersected the ground created a harsh horizon. I used a height field and tuffs of grass to create a more natural horizon and add depth to the image. There are several modeling techniques I used when creating various objects for this scene. The mushrooms are triangle meshes created using SPath. Several of the objects were created were created using Constructive Solid Geometry. I hand modeled the slug using blob objects. One of the most difficult techniques was used to create the butterfly's wings. In order to create the butterfly wings I used manually created triangle meshes. This is a technique that I am just now experimenting with. It is somewhat complicated and I suggest you look at the butterfly include file in my zip file. Essentially I used a 2D array of points describing a plane made up of triangles. In order to get something shaped like a butterfly wing I displaced the points in the array using parametric functions. Some of the other things I did with this image include using camera and lighting effects and randomness. The lens effect was created at render time using Chris Colfax's lens flare plugin. I also used blurring effects created by manipulating various attributes of the POV-Ray source code. I deliberately picked a focal point that would cause objects that were either really close or really far from the camera to blur. This brought the main object of the scene (butterfly and slug) into clear focus. I also chose to use area lighting instead of point lighting. Area lighting tends to yield more natural shadows because the edge of the shadow appears softer. The tuffs of grass where randomly rotated so they would not look like clones. The seeds in the wheat like grass were also shuffled around a bit to make them appear more natural