TITLE: Blue in the Face
NAME: Ive
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: ive@lilysoft.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.lilysoft.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ive_blue.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    A4-Scanner, Photoshop, Poser4, XFrog, Spilin, Wings3d, PoseRay

RENDER TIME: 
    about 30 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 800MHz 256MB



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I had the idea for the image 3 days before deadline. In the moment, render
speed is down to 1 PPS, 52% are done, rendering since 18h 45m and only 
15h 8m left 'till deadline. But if you are reading these lines, somehow it
did finish in time, but I assume it will not.

Anyway, I have tried to express loneliness by the use of blue light.
Blue light in the face but a warm lit room. Maybe the blue light comes
from the tv or some tube light from outside. 

After the image came into my mind there was only some modelling and texture
work to do. The conception for object, light and camera placement was already
clear.
It took 25h (without any sleep) to create the final scene file. 
Meanwhile I have had some sleep, the render looks promising so far (due to
the lack of time it is the first render with all objects together, radiosity,
area lights, scattering media, isosurface...), so for the moment I have 
nothing to do but countin' flowers on the wall, let don't bother me at all, 
playin' solitaire 'till dawn, with a deck of 51...     


NOTE ON THE PAINTING:

Henry Matisse. Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, the Artist's Secretary.
1947. Oil on canvas. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
 
I'm not sure if the judges like the idea of using a famous painting but
there were some reasons for doing so.
After having done the first test with the blue light, somehow that painting
came into my mind. I did not remember from whom it was and I even did not
remember the painting itself very well - so I searched my art books and the 
web and finally found it. And after having looked at the painting, I could 
not tell for sure if I did remember the painting after having seen the test 
render or maybe I had the blue in the face vision because the painting was 
already in my mind.   
For the ballance of the composition, I did need something to put in the top 
right corner and the colors of the painting did fit perfectly into the scene.
The lady in the painting gives me no impression of loneliness, but the 
digital lady in the image does. So I liked the idea of adding this painting 
as a *painting* to the image. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The lady is the DAZ Victoria with a high-res texture I've created 
especially for her. Posing and morph done with Poser 4.
The hair mesh is from Mr. Kozaburo, modified by me with wings3d.
It does use a new texture and transparency map done with Photoshop.
The cheongsam dress was made by Jim Burton and I have only modified the
texture a bit.

The chinese vase is a simple lathe object. The image map was scanned from 
a book about chinese art, colored and modified with Photoshop to fit the
lathe. The material does use media for subsurface scattering. 

The clock is a detailed CSG model of my mothers art-deco mantle clock.
Well, most details are not visible in that image, but there are some.

Flower pots and cups are CSG.
The plant was created with XFrog. It uses only two different texture maps
for the leaves, but 'cause each leave is shaped a little different, it 
looks quite realistic.
The cactus was derived from the isocacti scene file that cames along with
the POV-Ray destribution.
Soil in the flower pots is also isosurface.

The Triskell is basic CSG, done a few years ago. I usually put this 
somewhere into a scene whenever it is possible.

The table is a mixture of meshes and CSG, also done a few years ago, but it 
was never used for any image before. There was a complete mesh for the table
in 3ds format, but I do not remember where it did come from and I do not 
have it on my HD anymore. I was not satisfied with the look of the table 
(the triangle edges become visible) so I have done the plate as CSG.
The feet are still a mesh but used four times.
The surface of the table would use blurred reflections, but I have turned 
this off 'cause I was pretty sure by using this feature, the final render
would not finish before deadline.

The wall is a 3000x2000 hightfield generated with POV-Ray.

Mesh conversion was done with PoseRay. Thanx to FlyerX for this nice little
piece of software.  


radiosity setting:
  count 400
  error_bound 1.2
  recursion_limit 2

anti aliasing:
  +A0.08 +AM2

2x2 area light


FINAL NOTE:
It's done. 3h before deadline. I'm not satisfied with some technical aspects
of the image but the general mood is very close to what I had in mind, so I 
will submit.
And sorry, no source, the meshes and texture maps are much too big. But if
someone is interested, I will make the sources for the CSG objects available
as soon as I have cleaned them up a little bit.


- Ive