TITLE: Left Behind
NAME: Aaron Reid
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: scandia3815@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://scandia3815.home.att.net/3d/
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: leftbhdf.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

        Povray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 

        Moray, Terragen, PlantStudio, Crossroads, Photoshop


RENDER TIME: 
    51 min, 48 sec


HARDWARE USED: 

        Intel PIII 866


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A widower has left fresh flowers on the grave of his late wife,
and now returns by boat to his solitary life high in the mountains.

When I thought about the contest topic, two words quickly came to
mind: "separation" and "isolation". For the setting, I was inspired
by the striking surreal beauty of northern Norway's arctic mountains.
Without a doubt, the most wonderful and beautiful, yet empty land,
I have ever traveled through. I can't imagine what it would be like
to live alone in those mountains in the dead of winter, and endure
an endless night of 24hr darkness that lasts for 2 months.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


 Mountains 

The background mountains are a single heightfield created in
Terragen. I rendered a top down view of the landscape, textured
with a grass/snow/rock texture, and used this image as an imagemap
on the exported HF in PovRay. The imagemap was edited in
Photoshop to enchance brightness of the slopes of the mountains
that are exposed to the sun, which better helped to add the 'halo'
effect of a low afternoon sun casting light on distant terrain.

 Water 

I used a transparent blue texture, with reflective and shiny
qualities, plus a bozo noise map to loosen up the surface a bit.
This texture was then applied to a plane.

 Foreground 

The base foreground is a heightfield that has been textured with an
imagemap made in Terragen, by rendering a top down view of a flat
plane with a grass and snow texture. I then manually positioned (by
trial and error) the following objects on the foreground HF:

6 patches of grass (generated by Gilles Tran's excellent mgrass.inc)
4 patches of snow (HF's textured with a snow texture I created)
15 flowers (triangle meshes created by designing a series of plants
        in PlantStudio and exporting to POV format)
7 rocks (HF's textured with a rock texture I created)
5 footprint pairs (HF's textured with the same snow texture)

 Gravestone 

The grave stone is another simple heightfield, textured with the
rock material I developed. The texture was modified to include
extra layers containing the imagemaps for the portrait and the
inscription. The inscription was made with a freeware TrueType
runic font created by Jef Powell. The portrait was taken from a
scan of a pencil drawing I made recently. I used the portrait
for illustrative purposes only, the actual depicted person has
no connection to the image/theme otherwise. The original drawing
can be found on my website.

The bundle of flowers at the base of the gravestone were created
in PlantStudio and exported to POV format as triangle meshes.

 Boat 

I found the boat at 3dcafe.com in the free models section, it is
a nicely detailed mesh by Greg Crowfoot. I converted the mesh to
POV using Crossroads, and then heavily modified it by removing
extra components like mast, sails, railings, etc. and then
modifying the proportions of the hull. For texture I used two
basic wood textures, since texture detail at the distance the
boat appears in the scene would not be very discernable.
The man in the boat is another free object from 3dCafe.com, a
low polygon count model of a man in a seated position. It
suited my needs just fine, so I converted the 3DS file to
POV using Crossroads again, scaled it to match the boat, and
translated it into position.

 Artist Signature 

I added an extra texture layer to my base rock material, consisting
of a scanned signature I took from one of my paintings, and used as
an imagemap.

 Sky & Lighting 

The sky was rendered in Terragen, and then used as backdrop in the
rear of the PovRay scene. I played around with all sorts of things
like sky spheres, etc., but finally decided to go with the backdrop
as it matched the lighting of the rest of the scene the best.

I added a spotlight just behind the left most mountain, and
pointed it toward the grave stone in the foreground. It took a little
trial and error, but I positioned the spotlight so that it lined up
with the bright spot in the backdrop, matching the apparent position
of the sun.

The scene uses one other light, a point light above and to the far
left of the camera position. The light color is gray at 75% strength
(100% being pure white), and the red & blue values have been tweaked
slightly to add a warm tint to the scene.

 Misc 

I used Photoshop to edit/tweak grayscale images used for height fields,
various image maps like artist signature and the grave stone portrait,
and to convert image to JPG format.

Final thoughts:

This is my first entry to the IRTC. The last time I played around
with PovRay it was 1993 and I was using version 1. At the time I
thought the scene with glass spheres on a reflective plane that I
made was pretty amazing. I came across the IRTC website about a
month ago, and was completely amazed by not only how sophisticated
PovRay has become, but also by the remarkable images (both PovRay and
from other 3d software) that have been submitted to past IRTC rounds.
Working on this project was a lot of fun, I'm already looking forward
to the next round!

P.S. - I had to race to finish by the deadline, despite working hard
for nearly four weeks, so my source files are very messy. As soon as
I have everything in a more readable format, I will try and upload a
.zip file to my website with the POV source.