TITLE: Swallows Go Home! (swgohome.jpg)
NAME: Jens Dengler
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: jd@surveyor.in-berlin.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.in-berlin.de/User/jd/

TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: swgohome.jpg
ZIPFILE: swgohome.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1g.Linux.gcc

TOOLS USED: 
    GIMP (tga-jpg)

RENDER TIME: 
    4h+

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133MHz 32MB



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

South Africa in midsummer, in late February, in the humans-free grasslands.
The air is steamy. Some rain had refreshed the green in the wide fields.

This would be a good time for grasshoppers, if not the swallows from the
nearby Cape Mountains would be around, too, taking their all-you-can-eat
dinners before they will leave the Southern Hemisphere, moving North into
the coming spring in Europe.

In its about-15-year-life, every year a swallow does its flight from South
to North and back, that's about two times 10.000 kilometer a year. Each
travel takes about 40 days. So, within two years only their long distance
travels take them once around the world. Everytime they have to surpass the
Sahara within 3 days or they will die of dehydration. Everytime they have to
pass Mediterranian and North African high nets of the humans who eat them
as delicatessen.

And every February its the same sigh of the grasshoppers: Swallows go home!



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Synopsis: povray +w800 +h600 +v -i swgohome.pov

Main thing I wanted to see with this image is whether it is really so
difficult to make some better grass. At the IRTC round with the topic ruins
I saw some *very* funny sort of grass. - I admid: My own was funny, too.
It was a buried naked tree... 8-) This time its a sphere subtracted from a
sphere, smashed and stretched, painted with a gradient texture with a bit
transparent colors. And another type of dried grass made of cones.

The positioning was easy using a two dimensional loop and the random
generator with a small grid. On the other hand, the necessary mass of grass
is difficult to handle, even more with a slow iron like mine. More than
10.000 grass leafs are causing swapping, making the rendering time way out
of bound. Therefore there had to be a bit "intelligent" perspective.

As one of my first tries with PoVRay years ago I had modelled an ant of
chrome, and the grasshopper has inherented some of the ideas of this metal
ant. The swallows are modelled according to some pictures I drew, watching
some real swallows in my neighborhood.

For the people who thought my previous images were too dark I had included
some fill lights this time. But seeing it on a Pissie-Screen not at home,
I recognized for the first time that on a different hardware than mine mainly
the shadowed parts are really too dark, still.  So with the conversion from
TGA to JPG I gamma-corrected the colors radically, too.

As the final step, because its used so many times and nearly never punished,
I wanted to use both focal blur and lens flare, mainly for getting into it.
(Both, because focal blur isn't everything, you know, you know, you know? 8-)
The focal blur is only sparsely set for smudging the very distance and the very
close. Because of this no antialiasing is necessary as a raytracing parameter.

Different than with the previous picture this time I take part in terms of the
olympic idea, again. Still, the image was about ten days of fulltime work.
One problem with the creation time was that in the middle when modelling the
swallows... suprisingly I got employed. My prime design for the main wings
was to make them out of many smashed spheres simimilar to feathers, but for
a first model I made the wings out of a smashed sphere subtracted by a sphere.
Because my time was running out, I had to stay with the first model.

The (SoftGlow) flare is hopefully not that obtrusive - with it I didn't had
to bother making a sun with some halo. Its made with the macros of Chris
Colefax (muchos kudos to him).  Within the source the used lens effects files
are omitted. I recommend to get the latest from his site.
                                                                -- jd --

