TITLE: Flight of the Bumble Bee
NAME: Benny Wilkie
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: wilkie@intplsrv.net
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bumbleb.jpg
ZIPFILE: bumbleb.zip
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for windows
TOOLS USED: Orb-Cyl, Corel Photo Paint 3.0, Breeze 2.0
RENDER TIME: 14 hours (roughly..I forgot to check)
HARDWARE USED: AMD DX4/133, 16 meg ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Bumble Bee looking for breakfast

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image would not have been possible without the program Orb-Cyl.  Available
from: --John Beale  beale@best.com  3/24/96
                    http://www.best.com/~beale/
This is a program that allows you to "wrap" a height field around a sphere or a
cylinder.  And thanks go to Joseph Durbin from the Newsgroup c.g.r.r. for
directing me to the program.

OK...Height fields...Billions and Billions of height fields (as Carl Sagan
might
say).  Almost everything in this image is height fields.  The Bee is just a
bunch of spheres stuck together.  Then I used Orb-Cyl to give it the "fuzzy"
look. Same thing with the flowers.  

The Bees eyes were also made with Orb-Cyl, I just used a different gif image
(lots of hexagons made on Corel Photo Paint) to give it that bug eye look.  

I used Breeze 2.0 to get the proportions for the legs right, they are just a
lot
of cylinders and spheres and some cones.  Then used Orb-Cyl again to make them
fuzzy.

 The grass is two height fields of different colors to add some variety to the
background. The grass doesn_t work well close up (looks like green spikes) but
since I was planning flowers in the foreground anyway I didn_t try and fix it. 
I don_t think it looks too bad as grass from a distance. 

The wings are disks (scaled of course) with a crackle finish and a black
filter.
The veins in the wings are ... guess what? another height field, clipped by a
box and scaled. I sure do like height fields! 

The only things in this image that aren_t height fields are the sky: it came
with povray3.0...hang my head in shame I didn_t even fiddle with it at all. 
And the flower petals: portions of hollow spheres..  the pink stripes are
portions of toruss'.

Include files: I didn_t put them in the .zip file because they are HUGE! two of
them are 12.5 meg each! But I did give the commands to create them with Orb-Cyl
at the top of bumbleb.pov.  There are four of them...Fuzz.inc, Compound.inc,
Cylfuzz.inc and Headfuzz.inc. 
That_s it..

PS.  Povray should come with a disclaimer, something like: "the Surgeon General
has determined that raytracing can be addictive to certain individuals, has
caused loss of sleep, eye strain, and very possibly the melt down of thousands
of perfectly good brain cells".  :)        
  

