EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de NAME: Norbert Kern TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: warm_up COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: not yet RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7 TOOLS USED: Spatch, LParser, Xfrog, Plantstudio, 3DWin, 3D-Exploration, OBJuvPOV, Warpīs/Colefaxīs Compressed Mesh Macro, Photoshop RENDER TIME: parse 11 min 40 sec / trace 101 h 18 min (AA 0.1)/ 1110 MB peak memory HARDWARE USED: 1,4 GHz Athlon C / 1 GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Morningtime: a swarm of butterflies is warming up near a small arm of a river. Generally butterflies are only able to fly at a body temperature of 30 °C or above. Once they are flying, they can keep up their body temperature. Painted Ladies are the most widely distributed butterflies in the world and can be found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica. Occasionally the butterflies make mass migrations in search of a new habitat. And perhaps sometimes a swarm can be seen at a sunlit meadow warming up... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image is centured around the idea of generating complex, but random landscapes with povray. Thus I was experimenting with "trace" and "eval_pigment". These powerful megapov commands make it possible to place an object at another object with a probability given by accompanying imagemaps. All objects in this image are placed with this method. The ground consists of two heightfields - a small one in the foreground and a nine times as large one in the background. The imagemaps were first drawn by hand in photoshop and then disturbed by a clouds filter. The water is a heightfield based on pov code. There are 181 trees (eight different ones), 55500 grass blades, 3000 ferns (each with two different sorts) and many other plants like 200 rotten leafes near the waterline in the foreground. Then there are 500 butterflies placed on the ferns in the right foreground and 1200 butterflies placed "in the air". The objects were placed with nine different maps. Most of the trees are created with Xfrog (http://www.greenworks.de/), exported as an obj file and converted with OBJuvPOV . The grass is not mine. The bushy one is based on Mick Hazelgroveīs grass macro (povray.binaries.scene-files / 14.nov 99) and the other one is basically from Samuel Bengeīs country_grass macro (povray.binaries.scene-files / 25.june 00) with contributions from Anthony Bennett (povray.binaries.scene-files / 1.july 00). I added some more random factors. The macros can be found at news.povray.org. I took these macros because I havenīt had any experience in defining meshs up to now. The great fern is from LParser (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljlapre/lparser.htm). The direct export to povray leads to very slow renderings. But export in a mesh formate, conversion, import with OBJuvPOV and compression with Warpīs/Colefaxīs Compressed Mesh Macro (http://www.geocities.com/ ccolefax/pcm.html) gives good results in terms of time and memory savings. All 2500 ferns consume together only about 7 MB. Analogous compression of other meshes failed so far because of texture problems. Rest of the plants are hand coded or made with Plantstudio (http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/) or Xfrog. The rotten leafes were created with Spatch. The butterflies are an adaption of Micha Riserīs swallow tail (http://www.povworld.de/cgi-bin/objects/Nature/Animals/). The code was changed to allow different fore- and backsides of the wings. All textures were accordingly changed. The main problem was memory consuming. Some objects behaved fine and consumed only a small amount of memory for the copies. But some objects, especially the pov coded ones, behaved as if they would need an exact multiple of the single object. As I added more and more plants, my old computer with 224 MB RAM become more and more instable when rendering all objects. There was also a problem with the lights. I couldnīt use radiosity because of the many objects. One night I started a small test render with only the trees and the most simple radiosity settings thinkable. Only thousend points were rendered after 16 hours despite parsing fast! But with only fill lights the shadowed parts of the image looked flat. So I defined a global illumination fake with several lights evenly distributed on the sky. I took the coordinates of a buckminsterfulleren (looks like a football (soccer in USA)). From these 60 coordinates I choose the 11 most relevant ones and put dim shadowing lights on them. Render time is six time as long as with fill ligths only, but the results are worth the effort. The next problem was that my computer didnīt start to render the final image with all objects and the global illumination fake. I deinstalled most programs, transferred unneeded data to other harddisks and increased the swap space to 3 GB. But it was all in vain. After 20 h of severe harddisk trashing the computer hasnīt even begun to trace. So I gave up and bought a new computer with the fastest X86 processor available today and with 1 GB RAM. This was a very good idea. Parsing time reduced to 12 minutes (!) and tracing was a magnitude faster. Unfortunately, the time didn't suffice for a correct test any more. Because of this some textures seem unharmonious. The zip file contains all but the tree files because of their size. I also scaled the imagemaps down to reduce the zip file size further. Finally I want to thank all, who made comments regarding my WIPīs on news.povray.org.