TITLE: Stranded
NAME: Graham Watson
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: pebbleisland@btopenworld.com
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: stranded.jpg
ZIPFILE: stranded.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    SPatch and Poser 4

RENDER TIME: 
    6h 50m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 500MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


When I first read the topic title this was the image that came to mind. The man
has been stranded on a rather stereotypical desert island. No-one knows how he
got there. Maybe his plane crashed, or his boat sank. He finds himself on this
desert island with nothing but his notepad and a bottle of wine. That was
lucky, wasn't it :)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I have been using POV-Ray for just over a month, after my friend impressed me
with some of his work.

I started off by creating a sky that I will be able to re-use in future scenes.
My sky takes a time of day, a latitude and a longitude, and draws the stars,
Milky Way, Earth's atmosphere, the Sun, and the clouds from those parameters.

Then I started work on the island, which is actually a merge between a plane and
a height field created by a function. I then started work on a height field
ocean, which was set to create ripples from the island and the bottle. I later
scrapped the height field ocean and went for an isosurface merged with a plane
to get much greater detail and to roughen it up a bit. The ocean contains an
absorbing media so that the island can be seen fading off as it drops away
under the sea.

After sorting out the ocean and the island, I began work on the bottle. I made
the bottle out of 18 Bezier splines passed through a lathe. This was done
entirely by hand; no modelling software was used for the bottle. The cork is
made of a cone. To create the POV logo on the cork I created a stamp from the
standard include files and differenced it with the cork.

For the tree on the island, I started trying to blob one together, but my friend
pointed me in the direction of TomTree, which is a great collection of macros
that I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to make trees of any shape and
form.

I then started work on the paper. My first attempt at the paper was an
isosurface with a spiral maths function. It looked good, but it looked too
mathematical, and I found it hard to add slight irregularities to it. So I
resorted to downloading SPatch and I used that to create a much more natural
piece of paper. The paper actually uses two textures: the front face with the
writing on it, and the back face (created with interior_texture) with a faded
version of the writing on it. This makes it look like the writing is showing
through to the back of the paper slightly.

Then it was time to do the person. I started by just placing a load of spheres
and cylinders in roughly the right places. When I was relatively happy with the
pose, I put all of the spheres and cylinders in to a blob object, and started
tweaking. Then I added textures to the blob, and a hat made of two cylinders.
The man stayed like this for some time, although I couldn't resist the urge to
try out Poser 4, and I was so impressed with the results that I couldn't bring
myself to keep the blob man. The current scene contains the man from Poser 4,
converted to POV format with PoseRay. It took just as long to pose him and cloth
him as the blob man took to make, so I don't feel too guilty about using a
modelling program :)

After that I added some sun flare using the nkFlare 5 include files. I thought
that it was a nice touch because it makes the sun look really bright and bloom
out over the water slightly.

The scene uses the low quality outdoor default radiosity setting and also
photons. The photons create a very nice effect where they get focussed through
the bottle and on to the paper.

I also experimented with ground fog and focal blur, but decided that the image
was better clearer.

I would like to thank Ben Weston for getting me in to POV-Ray and giving me a
few useful pointers.

