TITLE: Dandelion Flight
NAME: Neil Herriford
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: harriman@teleport.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dflight.jpg
RENDERER USED: Persistence of Vision Raytracer version 3.0e
TOOLS USED: PovSB v.99l, Rhinoceros Beta 12-20-96, TextureMagic version .95,orb
v.2b, Terrain Forge 2.0.9, Paint Shop Pro 4.1

RENDER TIME: 1 hour 26 minutes 31.0 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Windows 95 running on a Pentium 166 with 32 megs of ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The summer breeze on a lazy Sunday afternoon slowly blows the seeds of a
Dandelion.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
     The leaves along with the stalk were modeled in Rhino (Beta 12-20-96),
converted to RAW, and then assembled in PovSB v.99l.  Each "fluff" on the
dandelion is a group of 8-10 Bezier patches.  The grass was made up of height
fields generated with the Paint Shop Pro "Add Noise" filter.  The stone wall
in the background was created using height fields generated in Terrain Forge
2.0.9, touched up in Paint Shop Pro, and then "wrapped around spheres" with
John Beale's excellent Orb v.2b.  Most of the textures were generated in
Texture Magic, and then touched up by hand.  The size of the pov file
uncompressed was over 16 megs, which is why I did not choose to include source
code, but it is available on request.
     This was a fun image for me to create, because modeling organic objects
and getting them to look right is both challenging and rewarding.  In modeling
this scene, I learned a lot about how PoVRay handles memory.  All those Bezier
patches really slowed things down.  Originally I had designed a grass
generation utility that would randomly put tens of thousands of cones in a
bounding box.  Parsing time exploded, as did rendering time, especially with
anti-aliasing turned on.  But I think the scene looks just as good with height
fields, and a very low u_steps and v_steps value for the patches.