TITLE: Awakening
NAME: Ron Gow
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rgow@lanset.com
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: awake_rg.jpg
ZIPFILE: awake_rg.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    PovRay 3.5


TOOLS USED: 

    PovTree & TomTreeM macro by Gena Obukhov & Tom Aust 
    SpilinEditor by Alessandro Falappa
    Paintshop Pro 7 used for conversion to .jpg


RENDER TIME: 

    PovRay: 1 hr 22 min 


HARDWARE USED: 

    Pentium IV 1.8gz
    512 mg RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    He stared out at the world, revelling in newness. The gray 
    stone walls that had been his world for so long were now
    opening.  SHE had exposed him to color and life.  SHE had 
    surrounded him, truth and beauty, fluttering about him on 
    gossamer wings.  He was defenseless.  SHE seduced him, the 
    candlelight dinner for two, the long, lazy balloon flight 
    over the pole, and the island vacation in the tropics.  SHE
    had awakened his spirit, the Rachmaninoff Preludes, so dark
    and brooding, yet so strangely uplifting.  SHE had conquered
    him, overcoming his last feeble resistance with the wine. Oh 
    yes, mustn't forget the wine...  
    It all came down to that, he decided, the big question... 
    Was it love, or was it the cabernet?
    


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    After reading up on surrealism and the processes by which
    various artists created their work, most of it didn't seem
    very applicable to ray-tracing, so I devised my own, sort of
    a virtual version of bits of string dropped on a canvas. I
    call it the Associative Random Scattergun process.
  
    First I just created objects, lots of different kinds of 
    things, whatever popped into my head.  Next, I started a new
    scenefile, put all of my objects into an array, then randomly
    selected objects from the array and randomly placed them in 
    the scene. Then I would look at the resulting render and see 
    what kind of associations my mind made between objects. I did 
    several of these renders, making associations between them. 
    The strongest associations I kept, discarding the others until
    I was down to mostly the objects you see.  Then I started a
    new scene, manually placing things to strengthen the mental 
    associations, and adding sky, water and lighting to make a 
    real scene out of it.  (And I still have a lot of objects left
    over for future scenes!)
        
    Sky_sphere is layered pigments, blended into the horizon with
    some fog.

    Water is stacked planes to give the color fade with depth. 

    Islands are prisms with a conic sweep, made from splines drawn
    in SpilinEditor.  I had originally tried height_fields, but 
    they looked too natural.  The prisms gave me the very sharply 
    defined contours which I thought just looked more surreal.

    Stone path is superellipsoids placed along a spline using the 
    reorient_trans() macro and the the trace() macro.        Many thanks 
    to Jim & Luke at the PovRay newsgroups for their help with the 
    spline path.
    
    Wine bottle & goblets are lathe objects.
    
    Trees and bushes made with PovTree, except the palm trees 
    which are the sample file included in Tomtree.
      
    Gazebo, furniture, blimps & piano are all CSG.
    
    Butterfly is a sphere_sweep body with height_field wings.
    
    Almost everything is in light_groups so I could control how
    highlights and shadows interacted, and to help separate the 
    colors and objects. All light_groups have global_lights on
    to get shadow direction from the sun, a parallel light.

    Textures are all procedural by me except the butterfly wings 
    which are an image_map made from pictures I found on the web,
    and the furniture, which uses T_Wood24 from woods.inc with my
    own satin finish.

    Wanted to try radiosity, but it was a 45+ hour render and after
    the fifth time it was stopped by power failures I gave up.  
    
    Zip file contains everything except the tree files & the sheet 
    music which is copyrighted. Also I converted the image_map for
    the butterfly wings to .jpg and reduced it to save space.

    Thanks everyone for all the nice comments in the last round
    and good luck to everyone in this round.

