TITLE: Sammy
NAME: David Bowers
COUNTRY: U.S.A
EMAIL: CyberDab@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/dbowers3_14/
TOPIC: Insects and Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dbowslug.jpg
ZIPFILE: dbowslug.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    SPatch and Chris Colfax's Lens Flare plugin for POV-Ray

RENDER TIME: 
    Aproximately 2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    233 MHZ pentium 64M RAM,scanner for image maps

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

There has been a recent rain. Small drops of dew cling to tuffs of grass. As
Sammy peers
down into the murky water of a recently formed mud puddle he notices a subtle
white reflection flicker in the water. He looks up just in time to see a
speckled butterfly
come in for a landing just above him.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

One of things I felt was important for this scene was that it should appear to
be part of a larger world. I did not want it to look "staged". I wanted the
scene to imply that if you could walk around within it there would actually be
something to see. This meant that I had to make effective use of negative
space. I used a plane with a scanned image of clouds and a grass field as a
backdrop. This helped create the illusion of having a larger world. It did
create one problem though. The area where the backdrop plane intersected the
ground created a harsh horizon. I used a height field and tuffs of grass to
create a more natural horizon and add depth to the image.

There are several modeling techniques I used when creating various objects for
this scene.
The mushrooms are triangle meshes created using SPath. Several of the objects
were created were created using Constructive Solid Geometry. I hand modeled the
slug using blob objects.  One of the most difficult techniques was used to
create the butterfly's wings. In order to create the butterfly wings I used
manually created triangle meshes. This is a technique that I am just now
experimenting with. It is somewhat complicated and I suggest you look at the
butterfly include file in my zip file. Essentially I used a 2D array of points
describing a plane made up of triangles. In order to get something shaped like
a butterfly wing I displaced the points in the array using parametric
functions.

Some of the other things I did with this image include using camera and lighting
effects and randomness.  The lens effect was created at render time using Chris
Colfax's lens flare plugin. I also used blurring effects created by
manipulating various attributes of the POV-Ray source code.  I deliberately
picked a focal point that would cause objects that were either really close or
really far from the camera to blur. This brought the main object of the scene
(butterfly and slug) into clear focus. I also chose to use area lighting
instead of point lighting. Area lighting tends to yield more natural shadows
because the edge of the shadow appears softer. The tuffs of grass where
randomly rotated so they would not look like clones. The seeds in the wheat
like grass were also shuffled around a bit to make them appear more natural


