TITLE: Dreamcatcher
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/pshawpsoft/
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sks_drmc.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe PhotoDeluxe & Paint Shop Pro, under Win 95 (with an upgrade to
Win 98 about halfway through)

RENDER TIME: 
    42m 16s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P2, 266 mhz, 96 mg, 4 mg video card


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The dreamcatcher was given to the Turtle Island people by
Grandmother Spider.  Bad dreams are trapped in the web, while good dreams float
through.
     The bad dreams are, I think, self-explanatory.  The good dreams are:  A
moon landing, Dr. King, and St. Francis (for dreams of the mind, the heart, and
the soul); a dog and a butterfly (for dreams of nature tame and nature
wild--and also a pretty song); and a baby and an angel (for dreams of this life
and the next).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    There are 33 light sources, 22 image
maps, 19 seriously reflective surfaces (5 of which are completely hidden), and
16 translucent/iridescent objects in this image.  Well, at least I got caught
up on my reading.
     The dream images came from many sources and were
drawn/downloaded/scanned/hallucinated or whatever; manipulated in various ways
with PhotoDeluxe (with brief interludes of several other graphics editors);
converted to GIFs; and finally mapped onto spheres with various amounts of
filtering and iridescence.  Each dream "bubble" has a light source inside and a
teensy spotlight outside, all of various colors.  (The lights inside the
nightmares are shades of red and orange, which is what's visible on the walls
and especially on the part of the ceiling reflected in the mirror, and what
turned the blue Rubbermaid wastebasket red.)
     The 33rd light source is, of course, the moonlight coming in the
(off-camera) window across from the (mostly hidden) bed.
     The dreamcatcher web was woven from copious quantities of trigonometry and
homemade wine.  I used a macro in order to simplify testing various
combinations of parameters (number of ties to the hoop, string tension, etc.). 
Someday when I have some time, I'll clean it up and post it on my site, but
right now the code is just too ugly for public viewing.
     The tissue poking out of the box on the dresser is a simple, "hand-made"
bicubic patch object.  The little "thingy" visible in the mirror directly above
the cologne bottle is the hook that holds up the dreamcatcher.  Everything else
is pretty self-explanatory, I think.
     I used PhotoDeluxe to add the title, copyright, and URL lines, and PSP to
convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (72 DPI, compression level
2).
     About the dog:  That's a drawing of Augustus Dog Shaw (previously
immortalized as the "Dogfish" in Pshaw! Pfish, my Go Fish game).  Augie left
this world a little over a year ago, but still visits us from time to time, in
our good dreams.