EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
NAME: Robert Lee
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Death on Holiday
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: POV 3.5
TOOLS USED: IFranView, PhotoShop LE, Little
Gray Cells, POVTree, MakeGrass Macro,
Spider Web Macro, Tom Tree Macro

RENDER TIME: 1 hr 47 minutes
HARDWARE USED: 2.4 Ghz Pentium on Windows 2000

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Death enjoys himself as
he creates chaos and has his way with the 
human race.

Not only does Death seem to say "I told you
so!", as he appears in the crystal ball; but,
he also walks over the land, faintly visible
on the right side of the picture. This faint
image is not a critical element.  I just 
wanted to add a "hidden picture" to 
give people something to look for.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The picture was rendered with +w1024 +h768.  To 
reduce jaggies, +aa 0.3 was used.

Terrain: A black and white image was created with
PhotoShop LE and saved as a file.  The file was
converted into a height field to represent the 3D 
terrain.  The ground was covered with a texture
map applied with a slope function. 

Ground Fog:  A very thin layer of ground fog was
added to give a sense of distance and to provide
a medium to display the "hidden" grim reaper.

Lake: The lake is a very flat sphere brought into 
close proximity to the height field and developed
with a water texture and finish.

Foliage:  I used MakeTree by Gena Obukhov, TomTree 
by TOM AUST, and Makegrass by Gilles Tran.  
All meshes were placed using the trace function.  
Some trees and grass were placed one at a time, 
others were scattered around with random 
placement loops. 

Stars:  A crackle pattern was applied to a sky
sphere used to speed up rendering and reduce 
memory requirements in lieu of generating many 
spheres as stars.

Small Pagoda: The small pagoda in the distance was 
created using CSG by slicing spheres out of a central
sphere, adding the posts, duplicating the basic
element, and combining 2 elements, one on top of each
other. 

Large Nuclear Cloud: I used CSG to combine a cylinder,
torus, and a sphere into a hollow object and filled 
it with scattering and absorbing media.  Several 
small white light sources were imbeded into the top
of the cloud to make it glow.  An orange-red light
was placed near the cloud base with proper light fading
so the light would not impact the foreground.  An 
additional orange-red spotlight shines on the ground 
under the large cloud to make a burning effect.  

Small Nuclear Cloud: This CSG object is simply a 
cylinder and torus filled with media and a white
light source.

Incoming: The incoming missle on the right is a
hollow isosurface and a small sphere filled with media
and lit with a light source so that it appears to be 
an incoming missile leaving a smoke trail.

City Lights: These are high ambient spheres.

Foreground: The building structure, benches, and 
table are isosurfaces modified to make them look
weathered.  Wood and stone textures were randomly 
positioned to add to the weathered look.  There is 
a dim fill light placed above the rafters to help
light the roof.

Chimes: The design of the chimes on the left were
taken from a home and garden magazine.  A series
of spheres were combined using CSG and joined 
together with some small cylinders rotated at just
the right angle. The chimes are attached to the roof
with several tori chain links.

Lantern:  This is a scaled sphere, CSG'ed with a 
cylinder to make it hollow, textured with a
gradient y pigment map and a normal crackle pattern.
A light source is made to look like the lantern.
Light fading applied to an area light was used to 
light the foreground.  A secondary spot light was 
needed to shine on the lantern for the crackle 
pattern to be viewed properly.  A cylinder textured
with a spiral pigment map and a spiral normal was 
used to make a rope to connect the lantern with 
the chain links and the ceiling.

Spider Web: Thanks to Chris Colefax, a web could
be placed in the rafters.

Rugs: These are a couple of scaled boxes with a 
layered textures.  The first box has a fringe texture.
The second box has a gradient x and gradient z
textures to create a matted look. 

Crystal Ball: This is a hollow sphere given glass
characteristics which contains another sphere with
a transparent image map of the grim reaper.

Crystal Ball Stand: A sphere sweep object rotated
and duplicated 3 times, textured with a nice 
silver texture.

Grim reaper:  Another image of the grim reaper was
applied to a box and the transparency was set to
serve as a "hidden picture". Both reaper image maps
were converted to 8 bit GIF images so that
"transparency" could be applied to the image map.

There was little difference between the regular 
render and the render with raiosity.  I suppose 
there would have been a bigger difference if the 
sky had not been so dark.

IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.
