EMAIL: veijo.vilva@animal.helsinki.fi
NAME: Veijo Vilva
TOPIC: Dream
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT

TITLE: Serenity

COUNTRY: Finland
WEBPAGE: http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1g
TOOLS USED: NONE
RENDER TIME: 4h 40min (1350x900)
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

At first thought, depicting a dream by means of raytracing is quite easy
as you are not bound by any constraints of reality, but then you realise
that most raytraced pictures are in a way too unreal to be dreams as the
most haunting dreams often are more real than the reality. In such a dream
things may be different but they aren't impossible, not quite, and you
keep searching for clues which would confirm your suspicion that you are
dreaming, you do hope you are just dreaming and not trapped into a building
really without an exit. In such a dream you notice more and more details
which are not impossible per se but may clash with your everyday reality,
things may have an almost suprareal clarity intead of noticeably surreal
features, and you invent seemingly logical explanations for inexplicable
things.

So I started along those lines and began to design a picture which tried
to be very real but real in a different way, a mix of randomness and
design, lack of detail and an almost absurdly painstaking amount of detail,
naturalism and an almost surreal perfection unachievable with any camera.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I designed for a rather large ultimate format, i.e. 30"x20" at 254 dpi,
which gives a resolution of 7620x5080. I used povray31 and the textures
which came with it, only boxes, cylinders, cones, spheres, torii and
CSGs built from them. Time to trace the full-size picture is about 9 hrs
with an 1 GHz Athlon when a single point light source is used and
about 90 hrs with radiosity and area lights for the Sun and a reasonably
realistic ambient lighting.

I didn't use any fancy technics -- I wouldn't know how to as this is one
of the first pictures I've ever made. The script is a mixture of dead ends
abandoned at some stage, various test sequences commented out and silly
solutions -- I'd build most things differently now. I'm not including
the script as it has slowly turned into a master script for tens of
pictures, perhaps a whole exhibition at some future date (some of the
shots can be seen at www.animal.helsinki.fi/people/vilva/gallery/).

I started from a nucleus and added details one by one. The original
nucleus disappeared at some stage, and the picture began to live a life
of its own. The most laborious feature was the "harpsichord" and the most
frustrating part of the job was setting up a satisfactory illumination,
getting the shadows almost right. The sun ended up being a combination
of two area lights and the ambient a combination of four very wide area
lights. The sea is actually a plane of blue marble with a thin layer of
ground fog upon it.