TITLE: The Lone Cherry
EMAIL: suso@suso.org
NAME: Suso Banderas
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: http://suso.suso.org/
RENDERER USED: Imagine 2.0 for Windows
TOOLS USED: Imagine 2.0 for Windows, The Gimp 1.2.3
RENDER TIME: 6 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6 450MHz, 162MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  While sitting at my computer eating cherries and trying to think of a good
 idea for the "Loneliness" topic, I looked down at my bowl of cherries, which
 only had one lone yellow cherry (Rainier sweet cherry) left among several red
 cherries and knew what I was going to make.

  The yellow cherry usually hung out with his red cherry friends because there
 are no other yellow cherries around. But today they all left for the market
 and left him behind.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  Originally I started by creating a bowl for the cherries to sit in like the
 one on my desk.  Then the shelf, then the room, window, trim, trees, sky and
 finally the venetian blinds.

  While trying to setup this scene with the bowl as the main element I found
 it difficult to convince other people that the topic was loneliness.  The
 concept I was trying to convey more or less was the feeling of being a
 lonely type.  In other words, all of the other cherries are red and this is
 the only yellow cherry around.

  I started out by creating a single cherry.  This consisted of taking a
 sphere and caving in the top using a magnetic drag function in Imagine.  Then
 by taking a disc and extruding it along a curved path, I could make the stem.
 To complete the stem I crumpled up a sphere and placed it at the top.
 The cherry itself also uses a candy apple texture to make it look more
 realistic.

  Then I created the bowl that the cherries would sit in.  This is just done
 using an outline of the bowl and then sweeping it around.  I applied a
 brushed texture to it to make it look more like the bowl I was eating from.

  Then I made the rest of the room.  Just some planes.  The wood trim along
 the walls were just made from extrusions of outlines again.  I applied a
 sky picture as a brush to the sky and added a ground and some trees that I
 found online.  The trees are actually the only thing in the scene that I
 didn't make myself.  I'm not sure who made that object unfortunately.
 Something interesting (and amusing) that happened while I was looking for a
 tree object for Imagine in Google.  I did a search for "+Imagine +tree +iob"
 and noticed that one of my own websites on my server came up as the first
 result on the list.  It's pretty sad when you need to use google to find your
 own files.

  Anyways, after trying to setup the scene the way I liked it.  I realized
 That not everyone would get the "lonely type" theme that I was trying to
 convey.  My wife gave the suggestion that I try putting the cherry all alone
 on a plate.  So I made the plate that you see in the picture and put the
 yellow cherry all alone on it.  Pretty nice, but there is something missing.
 I thought that a nice touch would be to take one of the previous renderings
 I had done to test the scene with the bowl of cherries and make a picture on
 the wall out of it.  So I made the frame and then put the image mapped plane
 with the rendering on the wall and wala!  I had my final scene.  This allows
 the viewer to see that there is not simply a single cherry on the plate, but
 that the cherry also has some other red cherry friends, unless people don't
 notice the picture.

  I then played around with the lighting to get the look of a semi-dark room
 with the sun shining in.  You can interpret the shadows as you will, I
 didn't really think of any special meaning in them when I did the scene.
 But it does kinda look like the cherry is barred in.

