TITLE: Morning Glory
NAME: William F Pokorny
COUNTRY: United States, the state of Vermont.
EMAIL: pokorny@attglobal.net
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: wfp_wntr.jpg
ZIPFILE: wfp_wntr.zip
RENDERER USED: 

POV-Ray 3.1g.


TOOLS USED: 

Moray mostly to try things and learn.

Some modeling was done in POV Scene Description Language itself.

'Steve's Object Builder' (SOB) written by Steve Slegel.  It is a Perl script
or package which generates curves and triangle meshes. SOB
was used as is and also in conjunction with many small quick programs.
See: http://www.carr.lib.md.us/~stevensl/

Perl, Rexx and Korn shell programs typically generated the POV SDL input.

Photosuite was used to create the image of the angel.

The unix tool XV, written by John Bradley, was used to convert the image
into a jpeg, cut the screen resolution to 1600 x 1200, and do some
editing of images used in material maps for the sign.

PBMplus package written by Jef Poskanzer, with contributions from
many others was a help in generating the color maps.

The kolors2 include file by Ken Tyler. tylereng@pacbell.net

The mesh compression and manipulation utilities written by Warp and
Chris Colefax.

Borrowed ideas and techniques from Gilles Tran's tree macro, John
Vansickle's matrix tutorials and utilities and ideas from many others
who have made contributions to the public groups.

To model the sky I used one of a series of wonderful winter photographs
taken by my friend Stu Hall. I have included one lower resolution photo
so you can see the Vermont sky I was trying to copy. See: Sky.jpg



RENDER TIME: 
    Less than 10 hours at 8000 x 6000. 70MB.



HARDWARE USED: 
    Various. The machine I am on now is a P3 800MHZ 500MB.



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

What you see is not finished.... I just couldn't get it all done in
time.

For me working with POV is mostly psychotherapy.  A place where I can
express how I feel in a visual way - something artist in the IRTC
community and others do already, but a form of expression which is
new to me.

This image has three core layers of meaning for me.  The first is
obviously winter itself.  The second is a relationship recently ended
and the winter I experienced in my head as a result.  The third is a
representation of a recent metamorphosis in the state of Vermont.
Namely, the recent adoption of a 'Civil Unions' state law which grants
the same legal rights and privileges of heterosexual marriage to
homosexual couples.

Winter itself is long and dark here in Vermont.  A match for my winter,
my depression, which came as my whirlwind relationship with 'the angel'
crashed.

Maybe if I just list some of the symbolism instead of writing a book...

- Yes, the angel on the sign looks remarkably like my angel.

- She is a classically trained horn (A.K.A french horn) player.

- On moving to Vermont she, and hence we, became heavily involved
in the Civil Unions movement. Grass roots organizer => Herald Angel.

- The powder snow represent the comfort which comes with time
and quiet following a 'crash.'

- The car crash => My crash.

- I am coming out of my depression => Morning Glory.

- The state of Vermont is recognizing, and realizing the value of
the homosexual relationships around them => Morning Glory.

- The covered bridge, and we have many here, represents the recent
past for me and the community of Vermont.

- Those of you who drive on the wrong side of the road should
note the sign is facing the wrong way.  :-)

- The plant climbing up the sign is a Morning Glory, with brass horn
bell flowers.  I grew up in the American Midwest where this same plant
was sometimes called "Bind Weed."

There are other symbols in the image.  Some obvious and others probably
too close to my own experience to be picked up.

What is not done?  A large American Elm tree and some political signs on
it which were to represent the political debate and process which
occurred in Vermont, and in America as the Civil Unions law passed.  A
remarkable process.  I wish everyone could experience such passionate
public discourse in a small place.  It did much to increase my faith and
admiration for politics and people.  All government should be as
intimate.

The American Elm is a beautiful tree.  Nearly all have been wiped out by
Dutch Elm Disease.  The two I remember growing up are gone.  One was
taken out by a small whirlwind along side a neighbors driveway.  There
was a small flattened track through the corn field of perhaps 20 meters
leading into the tree.  Looked as if God decided to reach out and flick
the tree to bits with his finger.  The other died of Dutch Elm Disease.
A beautiful tree though it could have quite a lot of junk dying off
inside the crown, something noticed only when you got close.  I wish I'd
had the skill and ability to get this into the submitted image.... :-(



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I am an integrated chip designer by vocation.  Though I used Moray and
the windows interface to POV to try out ideas, I tended to fall back on
a chip designers habit of doing everything in 2D while pretending it is
3D.

Most everything ended up being translated from 2D representations by
scripts into what I needed. You'll notice many places where I could
have used POV's SDL to place objects, but I felt more comfortable
explicitly positioning objects whenever that was possible.

I used a small gif of an angel I found on the web via google as a model
for the ex-angel or rather angel-ex.... Hmm, perhaps both work?

I generated several hundred meshes, even of things which seem relatively
similar, so I could hack at each.  I got to less of this customization
than I intended though.  The posts, for example, have somewhat
differentiating textures applied, but I ran out of time and they look too
much alike.

The wood rails are hacked upon.  I took a chunk out here and there.  The
snow on the tops of the wood rails is fit to each and some bits of snow
where removed here and there.  I like how this worked out.

The snow on the ground is made up of bicubic patches.  I burned a lot of
time trying to get the look I wanted with blobs, meshes, CSG and it just
didn't work.  I turned to bicubic patches via Moray, but here too I, in
the end, wrote a program which reads a series of overlaying 2D offset
files to create the control points for the patches.

What else...  Oh, there are some blobs used in the sign object.  The
snow on the top of the posts is a superellipsoid.  The snow on top of
the covered bridge is a large mesh, I tried to use the bicubic patch for
the roof too, but I could not control them precisely enough.
The mesh does not look as soft as it should.

I learned and borrowed what I could from Gilles Tran's tree macro and
John Vansickle's matrix tutorials and utilities to implement the morning
glory vine.  It was the last work done and had to be there.  Please
don't look too closely!  :-) Some of the leaves are upside down, the
stems connecting the flowers to the vine connect about 1/8th too high on
the flower - which is why at least one of the flowers seems to be
floating.  There are also several collisions.  And I don't like the
curve of the stems.  My scripts need work!  At a distance I still got
most of the effect I wanted.  The vine and stems were generated with SOB
scripts themselves generated by scripts I wrote.  The meshes for the
leaves I generated with my own mesh generating scripts again using 2D
offset files similar to what I had done for the bicubic patches.

There are custom placed nails in every rail of the fence, the morning
glory leaves have veins...  All detail largely lost as the image changed
and evolved.

Textures.  All but a gold texture in the flowers has either been done
custom or was something part of the POV distribution I modified.

Lighting.  There are two point light sources above and below the ground
level to set the ambient light.  And two closely spaced point light
sources acting as the sun.  I would have liked to have gone to a larger
area light to minimize some of the shadow artifacts, but area lighting
looks less like sunshine.  Parallel light rays are needed and I hear
they are coming in 3.5.

As I write this I am unsure how large the zipped file will be. If large,
I may drop some of the meshes to save space, otherwise I intend for it
all to be there. Though, because of my methodology, I am unsure much will
be of any direct use to anyone.

Thanks to the POV and IRTC community. You have created an amazing tool,
amazing art and a terrific world wide community. For me it has been a
happy discovery and self therapy.

Regards, William Pokorny


