TITLE: Morning Glory NAME: William F Pokorny COUNTRY: United States, the state of Vermont. EMAIL: pokorny@attglobal.net WEBPAGE: None TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: wfp_wntr.jpg ZIPFILE: wfp_wntr.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g. TOOLS USED: Moray mostly to try things and learn. Some modeling was done in POV Scene Description Language itself. 'Steve's Object Builder' (SOB) written by Steve Slegel. It is a Perl script or package which generates curves and triangle meshes. SOB was used as is and also in conjunction with many small quick programs. See: http://www.carr.lib.md.us/~stevensl/ Perl, Rexx and Korn shell programs typically generated the POV SDL input. Photosuite was used to create the image of the angel. The unix tool XV, written by John Bradley, was used to convert the image into a jpeg, cut the screen resolution to 1600 x 1200, and do some editing of images used in material maps for the sign. PBMplus package written by Jef Poskanzer, with contributions from many others was a help in generating the color maps. The kolors2 include file by Ken Tyler. tylereng@pacbell.net The mesh compression and manipulation utilities written by Warp and Chris Colefax. Borrowed ideas and techniques from Gilles Tran's tree macro, John Vansickle's matrix tutorials and utilities and ideas from many others who have made contributions to the public groups. To model the sky I used one of a series of wonderful winter photographs taken by my friend Stu Hall. I have included one lower resolution photo so you can see the Vermont sky I was trying to copy. See: Sky.jpg RENDER TIME: Less than 10 hours at 8000 x 6000. 70MB. HARDWARE USED: Various. The machine I am on now is a P3 800MHZ 500MB. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: What you see is not finished.... I just couldn't get it all done in time. For me working with POV is mostly psychotherapy. A place where I can express how I feel in a visual way - something artist in the IRTC community and others do already, but a form of expression which is new to me. This image has three core layers of meaning for me. The first is obviously winter itself. The second is a relationship recently ended and the winter I experienced in my head as a result. The third is a representation of a recent metamorphosis in the state of Vermont. Namely, the recent adoption of a 'Civil Unions' state law which grants the same legal rights and privileges of heterosexual marriage to homosexual couples. Winter itself is long and dark here in Vermont. A match for my winter, my depression, which came as my whirlwind relationship with 'the angel' crashed. Maybe if I just list some of the symbolism instead of writing a book... - Yes, the angel on the sign looks remarkably like my angel. - She is a classically trained horn (A.K.A french horn) player. - On moving to Vermont she, and hence we, became heavily involved in the Civil Unions movement. Grass roots organizer => Herald Angel. - The powder snow represent the comfort which comes with time and quiet following a 'crash.' - The car crash => My crash. - I am coming out of my depression => Morning Glory. - The state of Vermont is recognizing, and realizing the value of the homosexual relationships around them => Morning Glory. - The covered bridge, and we have many here, represents the recent past for me and the community of Vermont. - Those of you who drive on the wrong side of the road should note the sign is facing the wrong way. :-) - The plant climbing up the sign is a Morning Glory, with brass horn bell flowers. I grew up in the American Midwest where this same plant was sometimes called "Bind Weed." There are other symbols in the image. Some obvious and others probably too close to my own experience to be picked up. What is not done? A large American Elm tree and some political signs on it which were to represent the political debate and process which occurred in Vermont, and in America as the Civil Unions law passed. A remarkable process. I wish everyone could experience such passionate public discourse in a small place. It did much to increase my faith and admiration for politics and people. All government should be as intimate. The American Elm is a beautiful tree. Nearly all have been wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease. The two I remember growing up are gone. One was taken out by a small whirlwind along side a neighbors driveway. There was a small flattened track through the corn field of perhaps 20 meters leading into the tree. Looked as if God decided to reach out and flick the tree to bits with his finger. The other died of Dutch Elm Disease. A beautiful tree though it could have quite a lot of junk dying off inside the crown, something noticed only when you got close. I wish I'd had the skill and ability to get this into the submitted image.... :-( DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I am an integrated chip designer by vocation. Though I used Moray and the windows interface to POV to try out ideas, I tended to fall back on a chip designers habit of doing everything in 2D while pretending it is 3D. Most everything ended up being translated from 2D representations by scripts into what I needed. You'll notice many places where I could have used POV's SDL to place objects, but I felt more comfortable explicitly positioning objects whenever that was possible. I used a small gif of an angel I found on the web via google as a model for the ex-angel or rather angel-ex.... Hmm, perhaps both work? I generated several hundred meshes, even of things which seem relatively similar, so I could hack at each. I got to less of this customization than I intended though. The posts, for example, have somewhat differentiating textures applied, but I ran out of time and they look too much alike. The wood rails are hacked upon. I took a chunk out here and there. The snow on the tops of the wood rails is fit to each and some bits of snow where removed here and there. I like how this worked out. The snow on the ground is made up of bicubic patches. I burned a lot of time trying to get the look I wanted with blobs, meshes, CSG and it just didn't work. I turned to bicubic patches via Moray, but here too I, in the end, wrote a program which reads a series of overlaying 2D offset files to create the control points for the patches. What else... Oh, there are some blobs used in the sign object. The snow on the top of the posts is a superellipsoid. The snow on top of the covered bridge is a large mesh, I tried to use the bicubic patch for the roof too, but I could not control them precisely enough. The mesh does not look as soft as it should. I learned and borrowed what I could from Gilles Tran's tree macro and John Vansickle's matrix tutorials and utilities to implement the morning glory vine. It was the last work done and had to be there. Please don't look too closely! :-) Some of the leaves are upside down, the stems connecting the flowers to the vine connect about 1/8th too high on the flower - which is why at least one of the flowers seems to be floating. There are also several collisions. And I don't like the curve of the stems. My scripts need work! At a distance I still got most of the effect I wanted. The vine and stems were generated with SOB scripts themselves generated by scripts I wrote. The meshes for the leaves I generated with my own mesh generating scripts again using 2D offset files similar to what I had done for the bicubic patches. There are custom placed nails in every rail of the fence, the morning glory leaves have veins... All detail largely lost as the image changed and evolved. Textures. All but a gold texture in the flowers has either been done custom or was something part of the POV distribution I modified. Lighting. There are two point light sources above and below the ground level to set the ambient light. And two closely spaced point light sources acting as the sun. I would have liked to have gone to a larger area light to minimize some of the shadow artifacts, but area lighting looks less like sunshine. Parallel light rays are needed and I hear they are coming in 3.5. As I write this I am unsure how large the zipped file will be. If large, I may drop some of the meshes to save space, otherwise I intend for it all to be there. Though, because of my methodology, I am unsure much will be of any direct use to anyone. Thanks to the POV and IRTC community. You have created an amazing tool, amazing art and a terrific world wide community. For me it has been a happy discovery and self therapy. Regards, William Pokorny