TITLE: Flower
NAME: Bernard Hatt
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: bmh@arkady.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: flower.jpg
ZIPFILE: flower.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.6.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Linux (Slackware), MicroEmacs (3.11), pngtopnm, cjpeg

RENDER TIME: 
    143 hours 53 minutes 38 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 2400


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


After thinking about what would be a minimalist image, I looked
at typical 'still life' subjects pared down to the minimum simplicity.

Having thought about a single piece of fruit in a bowl, I decided to go
with a 'bunch of flowers in a vase' reduced to a single simple flower in
a simple vase.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The vase is a simple CSG shape (cylinder capped with a torus both ends
and hollowed out with (a cylinder and a scaled sphere)), there is a
slight bozo normal applied to the glass to make the caustics look
natural.

The stem for the flower is a sphere sweep, and the center of the flower
is made from scaled spheres (with variation in colour, size, offset
etc.)

Bubbles in the water are placed on to the stem and the inside of the
vase with trace().

The plane on which the vase is standing isn't checkered, but does have a
slight woven texture.

For the petals on the flower I planned to just use scaled spheres, but
it was nowhere near realistic enough, so they ended up as a quite
complex isosurface, each based on a rounded cylinder with a non-linear
stretch, each one has an individual curl in two directions, ridges, a
twist and bozo bumps applied.

Colouring for the flower/stem was taken from sampling pixels from some
of my flower photos.

Overall focal blur is applied to the picture (it took a few goes before
it looked 'right').

ZIP FILE:

The zip file contains the full source, (flower.pov and petal.inc), and a
couple of the shape/colour reference photo's I used.