EMAIL: pebbleisland@btopenworld.com
NAME: Graham Watson
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Stranded
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: SPatch and Poser 4
RENDER TIME: 6h 50m
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

When I first read the topic title this was the image that came to mind. The man has been stranded on a rather stereotypical desert island. No-one knows how he got there. Maybe his plane crashed, or his boat sank. He finds himself on this desert island with nothing but his notepad and a bottle of wine. That was lucky, wasn't it :)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I have been using POV-Ray for just over a month, after my friend impressed me with some of his work.

I started off by creating a sky that I will be able to re-use in future scenes. My sky takes a time of day, a latitude and a longitude, and draws the stars, Milky Way, Earth's atmosphere, the Sun, and the clouds from those parameters.

Then I started work on the island, which is actually a merge between a plane and a height field created by a function. I then started work on a height field ocean, which was set to create ripples from the island and the bottle. I later scrapped the height field ocean and went for an isosurface merged with a plane to get much greater detail and to roughen it up a bit. The ocean contains an absorbing media so that the island can be seen fading off as it drops away under the sea.

After sorting out the ocean and the island, I began work on the bottle. I made the bottle out of 18 Bezier splines passed through a lathe. This was done entirely by hand; no modelling software was used for the bottle. The cork is made of a cone. To create the POV logo on the cork I created a stamp from the standard include files and differenced it with the cork.

For the tree on the island, I started trying to blob one together, but my friend pointed me in the direction of TomTree, which is a great collection of macros that I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to make trees of any shape and form.

I then started work on the paper. My first attempt at the paper was an isosurface with a spiral maths function. It looked good, but it looked too mathematical, and I found it hard to add slight irregularities to it. So I resorted to downloading SPatch and I used that to create a much more natural piece of paper. The paper actually uses two textures: the front face with the writing on it, and the back face (created with interior_texture) with a faded version of the writing on it. This makes it look like the writing is showing through to the back of the paper slightly.

Then it was time to do the person. I started by just placing a load of spheres and cylinders in roughly the right places. When I was relatively happy with the pose, I put all of the spheres and cylinders in to a blob object, and started tweaking. Then I added textures to the blob, and a hat made of two cylinders. The man stayed like this for some time, although I couldn't resist the urge to try out Poser 4, and I was so impressed with the results that I couldn't bring myself to keep the blob man. The current scene contains the man from Poser 4, converted to POV format with POVMan. It took just as long to pose him and cloth him as the blob man took to make, so I don't feel too guilty about using a modelling program :)

After that I added some sun flare using the nkFlare 5 include files. I thought that it was a nice touch because it makes the sun look really bright and bloom out over the water slightly.

The scene uses the low quality outdoor default radiosity setting and also photons. The photons create a very nice effect where they get focussed through the bottle and on to the paper.

I also experimented with ground fog and focal blur, but decided that the image was better clearer.

I would like to thank Ben Weston for getting me in to POV-Ray and giving me a few useful pointers.