TITLE: Stone of Stennis NAME: Gary MacKinnon COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: gary@mackinnon.com TOPIC: Lonliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: jgmrock.jpg ZIPFILE: jgmrock.zip RENDERER USED: Pov-ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro to convert to jpg. RENDER TIME: 1 hour HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1700 with 1GByte Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Almost 3000 years ago in Scotland a Neolithic civilization erected stone monuments. This one is part of the Stones of Stennis which is on the isle of Orkney. The image was inspired by a photograph in a book titled "Minimum" by John Pawson. The image is simple but its very simplicity makes it difficult. The eye is drawn to the individual details of shape and color far more so than in busy scenes where the three dimensionality of the composition provides much of the eye appeal. The rock is the central focus of attention and natural rock shapes are very difficult to model mathematically. The rock had been carved by humans into a basic prismatic shape but weathering over the years has roughened the surfaces. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image source is all Povray script. The rock was modeled using Povray's isosurface primitive. Basically it is a set of intersecting planes modified by noise. The source code for the rock is included. The clouds are created using pigments on a couple of planes. The dark storm cloud was a circle with some noise thrown in to fray the edges. This cloud is not of uniform color. Two shades of dark gray were combined with noise to give the cloud a more realistic appearance. A higher plane of whiter clouds was also created to place clouds at the horizon. Also a slightly gray ground fog was added to give a more realistic appearance to the horizon. The area that was most challenging was the grass field. I started with a macro to create grass written by Gilles Tran but this was really more suited for a closeup of grass blades. When applied to a large field it was all of uniform color and height so I added several features. First the grass was allowed to be placed on top of a variable surface. Second, I allowed the color of individual grass blades to vary. Next, the distribution of grass height was made far more scewed so that there are few very long blades but lots of short ones. Finally, I created a mechanism where blade colors not only varied locally but varied also on a larger scale so that the color of the field was not uniform as one looked across it.