TITLE: Loneliness
NAME: Aaron 'Serac' Hill
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: serac@hillvisions.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.hillvisions.com/
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: serac02a.jpg
ZIPFILE: serac02a.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray (3.5.icl.win32)

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch (1.5), Adobe Photoshop (5.5)

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 6 minutes 49 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    433MHz Celeron 192MB (Modeling), 1GHz Athlon 256MB (Rendering)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Three couples enjoy a beautiful day, while Lonely sits by himself.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This entry took about four weeks to complete.

I used sPatch to model the characters and the tree trunks.  The clouds and the
leaves on the trees were done with macros.  The ground under Lonely is a simple
sphere, and the ground in the distance is a height field using the bozo
function.  The path was done with CSG and two cylinders.  The ball is just a
sphere as well.

The tree trunks and leaves use a two-color pigment, and the ball uses a
three-color pigment.  The rest of the objects are solid colors.  (The
characters are composed of five pieces, each with a solid color.)

The ink'n'paint effect was achieved by rendering several reference images and
composited them with Photoshop.  The first image defined the base paint colors.
 The second and third images were used for feature edge detection.  The fourth
image was used for silhoutte edge detection as well as shading.

Photoshop was originally just the test environment while I wrote my own
ink'n'paint program.  Unfortunately, I could not complete it in time.  If I
have time in the future, I will probably continue working on the project, since
Photoshop is only useful for still images.  There is no easy way to automate
the process for an animation.

The following book was my primary reference for developing a production-quality
solution for emulating traditional cel animation:

  Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures
  Anthony A. Apodaca, Larry Gritz, et al
  ISBN 1-55860-618-1

This entry does bring into question the rule concerning post-processing for
still images.  Had this been an animation, my technique would be excepted
without question.  I feel that there is a spirit to the rules that goes beyond
their actual wording.  While the inking and painting is technically done by
Photoshop, the source images were generating solely by POV-Ray.  In fact, the
normal and depth information encoded in the reference images defines a 3D
environment.  With the exception of the text I added, every pixel in the
picture was determined purely by the reference images.  As such, I feel that
the image has not violated the spirit of the rules.

The source .ZIP includes the following:

  - sPatch files for the models
  - POV-Ray source for rendering the reference images
  - Photoshop actions for compositing the images

I apologize that there are very few comments in the POV-Ray source files.  If
you have any questions or comments, please send me an email.

