TITLE: The Sculptor
NAME: Kwan lye
EMAIL: KL@povray.kicks-ass.net
WEBPAGE: http://povray.kicks-ass.net 88
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sculptor.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    JPatch for modeling, meshcomp to create hair growing pcm files,
ImageMagick to convert PNG to JPG, hair macro

RENDER TIME: 
    3 minutes 57 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Nothing fancy, just a starving artist working hard on his sculpture.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I am new to 3D rendering. I encountered POV-Ray recently and I cannot believe
that POV-Ray existed more than 10 years ago and I knew nothing about it until
now. I like to watch 3d animation movies and I always thought that 3D animation
software is expensive. A few months ago when I was looking for inexpensive/free
software that would help me in furniture making (I needed a weekend hobby), I
found POV-Ray, a programmer-friendly (btw, my day job is a programmer) ray
tracing application. Well, I abandoned my initial plan (furniture design) and
am now trying to be a 3D artist instead.
 
Anyway, this is my first human figure project. After fooling around a while with
primitive objects (box, sphere, cone, isosurface), I started looking for
modeling tools for other kind of challenge. I found JPatch, whose homepage has
a screenshot about modeling a human head (with rotoscope). Unlike many other 3D
modeling tools (that are polygon based), JPatch is spline based and I find
JPatch is very easy to use, the only disadvantage being that it doesn't support
bone yet (I hope it will soon).

I successfully created a whole human body without any problems. I gave him arms,
legs, ears, fingers, etc., but when I tried to give him hair, I got stuck: it
is so difficult to do it by hand (I mean via touch pad). I thought I should do
the hair programmatically, and of course, I googled it first before
implementing it by myself. I found a hair macro
(http://www.geocities.com/ccolefax/pcm.html) by Chris Colefax. But to grow hair
in certain parts of my JPatch model is impossible since JPatch currently does
not support partial export. Luckily JPatch is an open-source project so I can
modify it to support "partial export". Now I can select patches where I think
hair should grow, export them to bicubic patches, use MeshComp v2.1 to convert
it to a PCM file, then generate hair using the hair macro.

I made a series of pictures and I picked one for this competition. The other
pictures can be found at:
Web Page: http://povray.kicks-ass.net:88 
Mirror: http://members.cox.net/kcl8901/web/3d/sculptor


I picked this picture because I think it best meets the requirements of
minimalism: clean image, the fewest possible objects inside the picture,
minimal use of color, and simplicity.