TITLE: Farm View
NAME: Hugh S. Gregory
COUNTRY: CANADA
EMAIL: hgregory3a@aol.com
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: farmview.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, TreeDruid, 3D Win,
            Paintshop Pro Demo

RENDER TIME: 
    29 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


While there are many spectacular landscapes around the world, one can
often forget that the simple things close to home can also be vivid
and compelling.

So rather then try to construct some exotic far away place, I decided
to remake a view from near our home in the mountainous valleys of the 
Canadian West Coast.

The view is from some old rusted steel stairs leading up a mountain
side to an Alpine Meadow park.  Looking back behind you, one sees the
a Spring Time setting, the fields tilled and ready for planting, the
grass green with vibrant new growth and a thin layer of morning mist
still hanging over the valley.  In the distant are forest covered
mountains from which the winters snow has already departed.

It is simply a Farm View.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my 3rd solo IRTC entry, although my wife Anne did help by
constructing the blue farm house.

Inspiration for this scene was drawn from a drive up into the head
of British Columbia's Fraser Canyon where the land opens up into the 
high plateau and farms surrounded by heavily forested mountains.

First I used Leveler again, this time to build the mountains which
surround our farm's valley as well as the low hills with in the 
valley itself.

Next I built, using primitives, the paved roads, fences and street
lights.  Sheet Beziers were generated to make the freshed ploughed
earth of my farm's fields.  

Next came the construction of barn, again with primitives, it's doors
and window frames.  While I was doing this Anne was building the farm
house.

Having decided on an elevated view, I built a steel frame staircase
up the side of the eastern mountain until I had several viewing 
locations to choose from.  It was later decided that the angle of
the shot from the site eventually selected would preclude much of
this stair case from view.

The sky is a hollow sphere with a light cloud texture painted onto
it and the layer of mist cloud is a storm cloud texture from Moray's
library painted onto an infinite plain.  I did several test renders
while adjusting the scale of the textures on both the sky sphere and
the mist cloud plain until I had the "look" that I wanted.

Next I made my first ever trees using Tree Druid.  At first I made
a single tree, the sum of who's parts became the master group all
other trees would be referenced off of.  Building my forest was 
accomplished by buring the master group at minus 100 feet and then
making referenced copies at various scales to produce trees from
12 feet high to 61 feet high.  This set of referenced trees then
were elevated to ground level (deep inside the eastern mountain
behind the Point Of View) and several hundred copies were then 
referenced off of it in groups of ten and scattered by hand around the
valley until I had a forest.  This part took two weeks of evenings.

The reason for groups of ten was to avoid over loading the edges and
vertexs maximums.  Too many trees and the whole thing just simply locked
up.  So after planting 10 trees I would mark the locations with a 
deeply buried disc called a "TreeLoc" that was the same diameter of
the tree above it.  In over head view in Moray this gave me a "map"
of what was already planted and allowed me to set that batch of ten
trees to invisible so as to not overload the program with too many
vertexs and edges. 

Once all was installed, I then readjusted the sun's light source until
I had the desired shadow effects and rendered the final image, with 
my copyright floating just above the hand rail at the lower right.

The 800 by 600 BMP took just 29 minutes to render on POV using my
Pentium II - 350.  The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with
a Demo version of Paint Shop Pro I downloaded off the internet set
to 5% compression to get the file down under the IRTC maximum file
size of 250kb.
 
I Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright
                 "Farm View" is 
Copyright(c)2002 Hugh S. Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.