TITLE: Taking Wing
NAME: Sonya Roberts
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition
JPGFILE: takewing.jpg
ZIPFILE: takewing.zip
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.00e.watcom.Win32
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 3.0 and Paint Shop Pro 4 to create imagemaps.
            HLab for creation of height fields.
            Texture Magic for creation of the clouds texture (based on the
            Clouds texture that comes with Texture Magic).
            Chris Colefax's excellant lens flare include file for a lens
            flare effect.
               My own nested-loop tree .pov file for the foreground trees.
               My own nested-loop .pov files for the creation of the "furry"
               cones and cylinder.
            POVRay 3.00 interface (with customized insert menu) for all coding.
            My unassisted and overworked brain to layout and plan objects.

RENDER TIME: 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 47 second to render 33,697objects

HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 w/32 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg
Graphics Card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

It's early spring.  The morning mist is only just beginning to burn off of the
lake.  Overnight, a fruit tree has burst into bloom, and is now attracting
several large orange & yellow butterflies to feast on it's abundant nectar (and
spread it's pollen far and wide).  Several giant dragonflies have emerged from
the lake this morning as well, metamorphozing from swimming nymphs into flying
adults.  Exalted, they skim along the edge of the lake on newly-dried wings,
their old skins abandoned somewhere within the nearby bed of cattails.

A couple of large green and blue butterflies have also flown up, to pay
attention to the many smaller flowers clustered around the trees.

A colony of subterranean beetles is undergoing it's annual spring swarming, as
tiny worker beetles escort the larger winged adolescent drones and queens to
the surface.  Already they've attracted the attention of a furry, anteater-like
creature.  Eyes bulging with excitement, it's long tongue has already speared
one hapless worker beetle.  It'll feast well before the colony has finished
swarming; but the little escort beetles are successfully fulfilling their
suicidal function of providing distraction, and several of the valuable
adolescents have taken wing, fleeing inland to safety, where they will spread
out to found new colonies of burrowing beetles.  The small escort beetles won't
escape to the safety of the burrow until the last adolescent has flown away or
been consumed.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The two varieties of butterflies and the dragonflies were all created using
image maps.  The wing patterns were drawn and colorized in Paint Shop Pro 4,
copied to Photoshop for blurring, cleanup, and conversion to 256-colour mode,
then back into Paint Shop Pro to be saved as GIF's (Photoshop seems to do a
marginally better job of colour reduction; among other things, it very
conveniently always puts white, my background colour, in the "0" indexed
position).  The bodies of the butterflies and dragonflies are simple assemblies
of squashed and stretched spheres, cones, and torii (Do you think you can see
letters on the wings of the blue-green butterfly?  Good, 'cause they're
there!).

The trees in the foreground were created using a nested-loop .pov file of my
own, available at my POV-Stuff page at http://www.geocities.com/Soho/Lofts/1022
- though after seeing how Chris Colefax's excellant lens flare #include file
works, I plan to do a few revisions to the current file and post a new version.

The trees on the far shore are simply stretched spheres on top of short cones,
with a crand effect applied.  They're distributed over an area using nested
loops and a rand() function, and their colours (the different shades of green)
are also generated based on a rand() function.  The cattails along the near
shore are also sized and distributed using nested loops and rand().  The
flowers are sized and rotated using rand(), and most involved nsted loops
and/or rand() in their creation at some level or another.

The distant mountains and nearby rocks were both created using HLab; rather
that include the .POT files, which are rather sizeable, I've included the .SCR
files used to create them.  The mountains were coloured using a .GIF file
(based on the POT file) to indicate where green, grey, and white were to be
placed.  This .GIF was created in Paint Shop Pro, and converted to 256 color
mode in Photoshop.

The "furry" creature was made using some shapes I've created as part of a
separate project I've been working on; so far, I've put together files for the
creation of furry cones and cylinders, and am now working on one for furry
spheres or hemispheres.
 The "fur" is formed of thousands and thousand and thousands of very thin
cones, arranged along the surface of a user-defined cone or cylinder using -
you guessed it! - nested loops and the rand() function (What, you think I
placed umpteen-thousand little cones BY HAND?
 Or using a modellor?  Not on your life!).  Once these "fuzzy primitives" are
finished, I'll be posting them on my web page too.

The grass texture is an image map that I cropped out of a rather larger one
that comes with 3D Studio Max.
