TITLE: Baseball
NAME: Dan Connelly
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: djconnel@flash.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: baseball.jpg
ZIPFILE: baseball.zip
RENDERER USED:
POVRay Windows 3.0
TOOLS USED:
Paint Shop Pro 5.0, ThumbsPlus
RENDER TIME:
59 minutes
HARDWARE USED:
PII 266 MHz, 64 MB memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
see below
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
see below
tools used detail:
POV-Ray :
rendering and most of modeling
Paint Shop Pro 5:
scoreboard image map (not really visible)
fence numbers
baseball maps (see below)
bat label
signature
ThumbsPlus:
JPEG conversion
sPatch:
baseball cap (not shown)
======================================================================
NOTES
theme notes:
When I saw the topic, this image occurred to me immediately,
so I decided to go ahead with it.
As evidenced in such films as "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural",
baseball has a special connection with nature among popular
American sports. The dirt of the basepaths, the wood of the
bat, the grass of the field -- baseball has elemental foundations
far deeper than football (best described as a pseudo cyber-war),
basketball (played on asphalt or indoors), and hockey (played on
an artificial rink in formal contexts).
As winter gives its first signs of relenting, that first
day when the sun shines and the biting wind relents, it's
"baseball weather" -- spring is on the way; life is good.
technical notes:
The bat is a cubic spline lathe object modeled and textured directly
with POVRay. Dimensions were taken from an image at
http://www.worthinc.com/ .
The ball is based on an image from http://www.worthinc.com/ .
Three versions of the baseball image were made :
1. a bright version for the "clean ball"
2. a browned version for the "dirty ball"
3. a grayscale rendering of the stitches only for the bump map.
The dirty and clean ball images were combined using POV procedural
texturing.
The basepaths and outfield are a POV plane.
The infield (and the overlapping portions of the dirt regions)
are quartic polynomials of the normalized form:
y = 16 (z + x) (1 - x - z) (z - x) (1 + x - z)
which gives it a bit of a crown.... only 3 inches in the scene
as rendered, but it makes a difference.
Note this is actually generated using something of the form:
y = 16 x (1 - x) z (1 - z)
and rotated 45 degrees.
The mound is a sphere.
The bases and pitcher's plate are superquadratics.
The home plate is manually laid out with triangles.
Two versions of the fence are provided. A circular
one is shown. Also provided is one modeled after the
shape of the Ebbet's field fence -- square truncated
with a straight segment in center field. The circular
fence looked a bit better, so was used in the submitted
image. Lettering is via Paint Shop Pro.
The scoreboard uses an image map (Paint Shop Pro) and is otherwise
constructed of boxes. Unfortunately the detail is lost -- it is
just visible as a silhouette.
The scoreboard and the foul poles were both given an optional
blur to reduce antialiasing problems -- the pole was rendered
as a 2x width 50% transparent white line, while the image
map for the scoreboard was blurred in Paint Shop Pro (where
it was generated). Note there is a screen next to the foul
pole which is also rendered as a semitransparent object --
rendering each wire of the screen would be unreasonable.
The sun, sky, grass, dirt, etc are all POV procedurally textured.
The sky is loosely based on a version from "skies.inc", but
is heavily modified. It uses 3 layered spheres and 1 ellipsoid,
the former for clouds and the latter for the red-blue color.
The sun is a disk with a transparency transition at the edge
to simulate haze. It is rendered with an ambience of 2 to
enhance its brightness in the haze. It was sized according to
the following data, from
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2683/solsyshm.htm :
mean distance from Earth : 150 Gm
mean diameter : 1.392 Gm
resulting angle subtended in sky : 0.530 degrees
eccentricity of Earth orbit : 2.5
I oversized the sun by 3x (linear distance to point of 30%
transparancy) from the above mean values due to
atmospherics. It still looks small due to POV's wide field of view
(120 deg default).
All field dimensions are compliant with the official Major League
baseball rules (see footnote) :
http://www.majorleaguebaseball.com/library/rules.sml
Lighting is provided from the Sun (infinite source) and a
local light (second-order falloff) to the left of the scene.
artistic notes:
The image is designed to evoke the temptation to pick up the bat and
hit the ball over the left field fence. The bat's focus is its
handle, for example. The representation of objects was kept simple
(for example, an spatch-generated cap included in the source
code is not rendered) to avoid detracting from the natural aspects.
The "stadium" was kept simple to enhance these -- the real grass, the
dirt, and the sky, the sun. The minimal scoreboard is
included to enhance the fact that this is not a modern major league
park -- it is designed to be used, not watched. The experience of
playing the game, and not the observation of the professional game,
is the focus.
---
footnote:
I am not in strict compliance with the following
from 1.04, as this would have increased the complexity
of my field shape considerably :
The degree of slope from a point 6 inches in front of the
pitcher's plate to a point 6 feet toward home plate shall
be 1 inch to 1 foot, and such degree of slope shall be uniform.
=======================================================================
APPENDIX : source files
scene.pov : the main scene file
header.inc : dimensions and textures
sky.inc : the sun and sky
scoreboard.pov : the scoreboard defined (renderable)
cap.pov : a baseball cap, not used in the final scene
(renderable)
sky_test.pov : a simple scene to test sky.inc
final.ini : IRTC-grade rendering
quickrender.ini: low-quality low-resolution rendering
scene.ini : a working ini file for misc test renders
baseball_bump2.gif : baseball bump map
baseball_dirty2.gif : dirty baseball imagemap
baseball_texture2.gif : clean baseball imagemap
bat_label.png : label on bat
fencenumbers_???.gif : numbering for fence
scoreboard.png : image map for the scoreboard
scoreboard_blurred.png : blurred version of previous
cap_logo.png : logo for the cap