TITLE: "The Jumpers", jumpers.jpg
NAME: Darin A. Nelson
COUNTRY: citizen USA; resident, Israel
EMAIL: darin@opt-imaging.com
WEBPAGE: --
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jumpers.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3, Chris Colefax's Liquid Spray Include File, Moray Liquid
Spray Plugin v.0.14 (Keith Hull), PaintShop Pro V. 7 (.jpg conversion and
copyright logo addition only), various custom utilities (see below)

RENDER TIME: 
    96 hours, 47 minutes, 28 seconds.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4, 1.7GHz, 256 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

     Two bears can roll a bottle of water as far as necessary across a tiled
floor; opening it is another story. Three are enough to transport a block, but
carrying a hundred of them takes a while.  Empty teacups require one teddy bear
each to transport. Full ones, four. The bowl is delicate, but heavy: six bears.
 
     Six frozen moments: Moment of Enthusiasm, Moment of Regret; Moment of
Hesitation, Moment of Recklessness; Moment of Contemplation, Moment of
Confusion.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I picked this hobby up rather recently (and this is my first submission to
IRTC), which, ah... shows in the process... as you shall read:

(SOMEWHAT UNUSUAL THINGS)
Bears: These are based on standard CSG. Note, however, that they have fuzzy
outlines; and on the wet teddybear, you can see strands. The fur isn't made of
cylinders, or of meshes, but of nested, partially transparent primitives for
fur (5-7 layers), applied by a LabVIEW utility written for the purpose. 

Yeah, kind of an odd approach, but it helped the bears meet my "huggability"
criterion. Apparently from ignorance of the proper tricks (see below), I
couldn't get enough hair primitives in the scene file to keep the bears from
looking like walking bottle brushes (the page file started ballooning above
100K cylinders), so I settled on this "poor raytracers' fur" instead.

The technique is an extension of what has been seen before for giving depth to
texture clouds and grass (see, for example, Rune Johansen's layering suggestion
for using his grass include file at
http://runevision.com/3d/include/include.asp). I seem to recall seeing a 
reference to "media fur" at some point, but this ain't that. I am (now) aware
that there are other fur techniques beyond those I tried which
might have served as well or better. For those few like me who might not be
aware of them: Parameterized isosurfaces using textures for shape definition
would have been another offbeat choice (see the POVRay isosurface tutorial for
hints of what this might look like); a better approach seems to be the
duplicated mesh technique used by the redoubtable Chris Colefax's Hair  Growth
Macro File,  (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/pcm.html).
   

Bowl Water: After rejecting various hand-arranged efforts, I broke down and
wrote an interacting smooth particle simulation for determining blob primitive
positions (basically, slightly sticky bouncy balls with a need for personal
space). Again, LabVIEW, so the source isn't of much general use. But see, e.g.,
 http://www.cs.unc.edu/~nyland/nbody.html for a more detailed discussion of
techniques for such simulations (I implemented the most basic simulation listed
on this page). A second utility performed particle frame summation, addition of
rotational turbulance, and conversion to POVRay script. The resulting fluid is
a bit agitated; but trust me, the jumping teddybear is not being boiled.
Simulated particles: about 1500. Particles in final blob: about 10,000. 

(NORMAL THINGS WORTH A COMMENT):
Other Water: The puddles are bezier patches with curved edges to imitate water
held together by surface tension. The wet teddybear has rings spreading from
his feet; these are from cylinders with a ripple normal texture, with the
endcaps aligned with the surface of the puddle patch. The spray is made using
Colefax's nifty spray macro (this, I did discover before I'd DTTHW), under
control through a Moray plugin written by Keith Hull. 

Blocks: Some of the letters on the alphabet blocks (aleph, bet, gimel) are in
Hebrew, in case you were wondering. The solid colored blocks are based on a
vague memory of the contents of the "Big Barrel O' Blocks" I had as a child
(now marketed as the "Big Bag O' Blocks," apparently). Looking at them, I can
almost taste the wood in my mouth. .JPG compression has all but obliterated the
texturing on the red and blue blocks, but it was there, once. 

Ceramic ware: none of the patterning is texture mapped, it's all done by CSG
(you can see the interior cuts on the bowl rim). Somehow this seemed classier
to me <shrug>. 

Floor: each tile is a separate object, curved at the edges. The grouting,
significantly, is an infinite plane. 

