EMAIL: ryanbennitt@lycos.co.uk

NAME: Ryan Bennitt

TOPIC: Complexity

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Shoots

COUNTRY: UK

RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.6

TOOLS USED: Silo 1.4, Silo 2 beta, GIMP

RENDER TIME: Parse 33s, Render 9h11m0s

HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 3200+

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Nature is complex at every level, but every plant starts off with a small

shoot with two leaves. From something so seemingly simple, all manner of

complex plants can grow.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I started out with the idea of doing a close up of a patch of grass, but after

taking some close up photos from the garden, I noticed some small shoots in a

patch of earth that inspired me to try modelling a close up of shoots

sprouting from the earth.



Starting with an isosurface for the earth I randomly generated lots of small

stones over the entire area.



I then proceeded to model some shoots in Silo and converted these using a

plugin I wrote for exporting various POVRay primitives.



To add some contrast and scale I found some dead leaves, scanned them in,

edited them in GIMP and used Silo 2 to create deformed leaf meshes and UV map

the scanned image onto them.



Finally I experimented with focal blur to try giving the impression of close

up photography.

