TITLE: Bees
NAME: Dave Merchant
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com
WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bees.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for JPEG conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 22 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    P120, 40 mb RAM, W95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The lawn mower operator has successfully located an underground bees' nest.

Nature has won this round.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is all CSG, in standard POV-Ray 3.01.

Working on the "50 Years After" scene got me depressed, so I decided to do
another scene, still on the theme of "Nature Always Wins", but not quite as
final.

The grass is a height field, from a targa created with the bumps pattern
scaled very small. The height fields were tiled several times, and scaled
at varying heights.

I wrote a C program to make the trees, as this allowed use of a recursive
algorithm to create the branches, The algorithm is essentially the same
as would be used to traverse a tree data structure. This program writes a
very large (800 kb) POV .INC file in less than a second. Since this is a
"flat" file, consisting only of cones and discs, with no symbols created,
POV parse time is very fast. The tree trunks were done with SPATCH.

The trees are patterned after my very old apple trees, which tend to spread
wide, with very tangled branch growth. However, the leaves are more like
maple or oak leaves.  The C program is parameterized to make various tree
shapes, but this feature is not complete, so I stuck with the apple trees.

The scene contains 7442 objects.

The deer are a combination of blobs and SPATCH, although it probably would
have been easier to use blobs exclusively.

The tractor, lawn mower, birds, and bees are all CSG.

The lawn mower is a model of the one I use, a big engine and small blade,
able to cut thru anything except bees' nests.

The antique tractor is a McCormick-Deering 10-20, of about 1920, which
closely resembles the contemporary Fordson, but was a much better tractor.

Note that the color of the grass is different in the two scenes. This shows
the difference between wild grasses and domestic grass of the "bluegrass"
family.


