                The Making of "Opportunity Passing..." by Charles Fusner

NOTE: The full source has not been included for this scene. My understanding is that the
point of the zip file to the IRTC is for educational purposes, and not everything in this
scene is educational, but much of it is quite large. Good example: The dolphins are largely
unchanged from Poser standard dolphins. If you can use Poser, you can make these dolphins
without me telling you a thing, so including the (sizable) meshes for them would be useless.

In place of what I don't include, I insert this log file which describes in much more detail
how this scene came to be. If you downloaded the source, I presume you want to know something
I didn't include in the main text file, so I babble a lot more here than I did there, trying
to explain every little detail, since the words in this text file don't know what it is you
want to know. We start with a history of the image and move on to individual descriptions of
how I did each thing. Bear with me, or use the section titles to skip ahead if you're
impatient.

                    Part I: What this scene originally was meant to be...
                   (subtitle: "Everything that can go wrong with an idea")

Photorealism was never the goal in this image. In fact, when I started, I had a drastically
more surreal image in mind which bit by bit turned into this image. By the time I realized I
was abandonning the surrealism, it was too late to give serious attention to photorealism,
so I settled for what I called Simple Realism (telling a real story as opposed to trying to
trick the eye into thinking something is a photo) and just told the boy's tale in as much
detail as I had time to fit in.

The original idea was this: The boy was sitting naked on a snow covered rock; he is encased 
in ice, but with largely the same depressed expression he wears here. In the water beneath the
rock, there is a faintly glowing image of a city street with people hurrying about on their
daily business. All except one character... a girl about the same age as the boy who is sitting
on a building stoop otherwise in the same pose as the boy. Both look equally depressed; 
He, alone and frozen in an icy sea; She alone amidst a sea of people.

I created the rock, the boy, and the sky (which was made with media clouds and a heavy fog)
and was fairly happy with the progress so far. Once I had a subject, I felt sure it was worth
pursuing the rest. At first, the idea just kept expanding: A few days later, I'd added the following mental notes:

To the boy's left is a shipwreck that told how he got where he is. To his right a distant 
ship sails by without seeming to notice him while a shaft of etherial light from above breaks
anamolously through the clouds aiming in his general direction, but doesn't quite reach the
boy, as though divinity itself has abandonned him on his frozen rock. Now, with the shipwreck
at the upper left, and "ray of divine abandonment" to the upper right, and the city scene in
the water below center, I pictured this like a triptych, only raytraced as a single scene 
with three complementary pieces centering around the boy.

Then things started to become unworkable. This shipwreck didn't fit unless I changed the view
so that the water in front of the rock wasn't wide enough to include the ghost-image-in-the-
sea effect. I moved the boy's island, but now it didn't have the balance I wanted for the
triptych. Then the ray of divine abandonment was not so divine. There was no place I could put
it that it didn't seem to get in the way of something, even after getting past the problems
with balancing a foreground media ray in the midst of fog and multiple background media. There
was too much dead space in the sea between the boy and the ship. I lowered the viewing angle
to kill some of the space, but you couldn't get rid of it all without making it a head on view
that nixed much of the details I wanted. 

In the end, I dropped the ghost-image effect, and the not-so-divine ray, and scattered some
flotsam and a rowboat in the water behind the rock. I moved the boy over during the process
of trying to make the ghost-image thing work, and now I found I kind of liked having him off
center, but that meant there needed to be something happening on the right to balance it.
Gradually I became aware I was abandonning surrealism somewhere about this time. 

In the end, I came up with an image I actually kind of like better than the original
idea. I'm not sure whether I now feel the original concept was too pretentious, too weird,
or just something I couldn't make work, but I kind of like the final image just the same.


                                    Part II: How was it done?


The Rocky Island: 
	Shaped in Leveller, exported as a 24 bit TGA image for use in POV-Ray. The rock texture
uses a gradient texture map which fades from just stone at the top to damp looking stone
partway down and then finally damp looking stone blended with algea. 

The Boy: 
	Once I had the island, I used my old Triscan macro to turn it to a RAW file and used 
3DWin to turn that into an OBJ file so I could import it into Poser. I then chose the nude
boy model, thinned him down so he didn't look quite so well fed after a week or so lost at
sea, and used the prop island to craft his pose. I had to rework his default textures
considerably. Darkened everything quite a bit, and overrode some odd defaults 3DWin has when
it converts a mtl file (like setting everything for phong 1.0 and blending the image maps 
with solid color pigments). 
	Of course, I simply painted his swim trunks on. In the original image concept (see above)
he was left naked to imply vulnerability that enchances the loneliness, but the pose and the
facial expression just didn't make vulnerability out of the nakedness. It just looked like I
wasn't done with the model. So I dropped the idea and gave him simple trunks. 

The Water:
	This wasn't really finished until the day before I compiled my submission. The basic
premise was simple enough: A normal averaging large scale bumps with small scale, slightly
elongated dents (with somewhat less weight given to the dents); A 70% filtered pigment with a
pale green-blue to it; And a watery ior and fade in the interior. No ambient or diffuse. But
I kept getting weird solid grey artifacts whose origin I couldn't identify. Drove me nuts.
Tried taking out each individual element with no luck. Then purely by chance I added hollow
to the water plane. Ummm... worked as expected. Hmmm... 
	Must have something to do with the fog and media in the scene, but since there shouldn't
be any underwater, darned if I know what. Anyway, it worked. Only caveat is: beware of the
changes to POV 3.5 that scale bumps and you should be able to adapt it to any scene. Look in
alone1_2.inc for a material called matWaterPlane if you'd like to tinker with it. 


The Sky: 
	I experimented with media to make stormy skies. Making puffy white clouds was easy,
but ruined the mood <g>. The storm clouds were trickier, and I still can't get used to not being able to place them where I want like regular objects, but I have to admit, they do look better as media than a flat pigment. I actually sandwiched the media between two hollow spheres (twice, really, there are multiple layers) and used a negative emission value of about -.15
to make the dark masses of the clouds. Less than -.15, or higher densities, makes the clouds
lose definition, but might be useful for black smoke effects. 
	Of course, the media alone has too many transparent gaps and I needed a fully grey sky,
hence the fog was added to fill in to prevent any background from showing through the sky.
	The source is in skytests.inc, if you'd like to tinker. I know there are improvements
waiting to be made. I just stopped when I was minimally satisfied with the effect for this
particular scene. IRTC Deadlines, you know. 

The Sunken Ship:
	Crafted in Moray, and merged into the overall scene. The broken masts are heightfield's
attached to the end of cylinders, and the dangling rigging lines are sphere sweeps (although
the taught rigging lines are just thin cylinders). The ship doesn't look very interesting 
below the waterline, because I usually don't craft things I know in advance won't show or contibute to the image, especially if I'm on a deadline. 
	The most interesting part, from my point of view was the sphere sweeps. They were 
crafted using my custom written perl utility sweepconvert.pl, which was "hatched" just for
this project, but has a million uses in the future. I'll try to include a copy of the current
version of this .pl file with this zip, but bear in mind, there's still one or two things I
want to change about it. Still the version I have as of this writing gets the job done just
fine. See the file sconvert.txt for more detail on using it. 
	The shredded bits of sailcloth from the intact mast is made with a reapplication of a 
technique I used once before to make paper with a tattered edge: I image mapped a partially
transparent surfaces onto a bezier patch. POV 3.5 has actually increased the potential of
this technique by adding uv mapping to beziers, overcoming a problem I used to have in that
you could not bend or fold the bezier too much or the image mapping became apparent in the 
trick. Here, it doesn't matter. There's so few scraps of the cloth that the twists in the
bezier turned out not to be all that visible from a distance, but its a fact worth remembering
for future reference. 

The Lightning:
	Also made with sphere sweeps, I actually Googled up some photos of real lightning to
shape these out of. I loaded them up as a background in Moray and used them as a guide for
placing the sphere sweep control points, then ran my sweepconvert.pl utility on the Moray
output, hence making lightning bolts that fairly accurately reflect the original shape of
the actual real world lightning they came from. 

The Background Ship:
	The fog made this look flat, no matter how I tweaked it, but it suffices. This is a
true Frankenstein's monster of a creation, put together from a number of different techniques.
The hull was spun into being by making an appropriate shape curve in Rhino and using a two 
rail sweep. The cabins and control house and smoke stacks are just POV primitives (there was
little point in wasting meshes to represent boxes and cylinders considering my choice of 
rendering engine!) and the smoke curling from the smokestacks are more sphere sweeps... Yes,
you guessed it: sweepconvert.pl
	It only became fully modelled *very* late in the image, so there was no time left to do
much more than just "make it look good at a distance" so don't expect much from it out of 
context, but for something only seen in the distance through a lot of fog, it does what it
should. 

The Rowboat:
	I actually did a search on rowboats, since nothing I made seemed to work at first. I
found one on the Moray website by Thomas de Groot and checked it out, but although it was a
very good rowboat, it was more of a modern, racing style boat. Still, it was an excellent
suggestion of all the things I had been doing wrong. I pretty much took it apart and rebuilt
it, chopping the back end of and replacing it with a flat panel endpiece, remove one bench, 
adjusted the rest, and then rounded the prow by altering the shapes used in the difference. 
	I also had to significantly alter the textures to make them fit in my scene's darker
color scheme, but that was pretty much a no brainer. Thomas's model as a guide saved me a day
or two over having to start from scratch, as I didn't have to learn every stupid thing I could
do wrong before getting to the finished result <g>. 

The Dolphins: 
	Standard Poser dolphins, converted in 3DWin. Darkened the texture map a little,
and manually undid some of the curious defaults 3DWin seems to do when converting an mtl file
(like setting everything for phong 1.0 and then blending the texture map with solid color
pigments). 


