TITLE: Another morning
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmcave.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmcave.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 
    animal encyclopedia - Odhams Books 1964
    Time-Life Books "Planet Earth: Underground Worlds" ISBN 0 7054 0745 4
        Gilles Tran's Maketree macro (not actually in the final scene though)

RENDER TIME: 
    Total Time 0 hours 39 minutes 29.0 seconds (2369 seconds)
    Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  11.0 seconds (11 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    0 hours 39 minutes  18.0 seconds (2358 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Another morning in the wilderness.

The pregnant woman is fussed over by her mother and eldest child.  The
youngest child plays at being a hunter, with a piece of fur from a
previous meal.  His father watches, knowing it won't be as easy for him
on today's hunt.  The middle child watches the sun rising, and daydreams
of making it stop in the sky, so that the children she expects to have
won't have dark nights to scare them.

She doesn't know that in the year they'll call 2000 AD, her descendants
won't be able to do that, and won't want to.  After all, they'll have
electric light.

She can't even imagine what they will have done - cut down all the trees
outside the cave to deliberately grow other plants for food, hunted to
the brink of extinction the animals that feed their tribe, mined away
the hillside containing the cave just because of a shiny material in the
walls, made the river undrinkable, and more.

In her time, the wilderness is all there is, and humans are powerless
and insignificant.  To her, it seems more credible that people could
stop the sun than do all those other things - because she can see the sun
moves, and she can imagine that it might stop.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I had a dream which included a cave, and decided it might fit the
topic for this round.  After some hours thinking about it, I modelled
the cave as a set of cylinders, and then converted them to blob{}
components.  Then I subtracted the blob from a box{} and modelled more
cylinders to make a rock face the cave was in.  When I turned the
cylinders into another blob{}, it didn't look as good as I'd hoped.

The next day, I moved the viewpoint into the cave, which worked better.
I edited the cave until it looked more like my mental image of it,
and worked out who was in the cave and what they were doing.  Oh, and I
lit a fire in the cave to keep the animals away.  Since then, I've worked
on the landscape outside.

I worked on the clouds.  (They're two planes textured with bozo.)

I did more work on the river, which is CSG elements cut out of the
plane that forms the ground level.  The hills are composed of blob{}
elements.

I experimented with various textures, and then edited the results to
match colour photos in an animal encyclopedia more closely.

The cave texture was then revised based on the photos in the "Underground
Worlds" book.

I used various pictures (I forgot to note the sources) to find enough
people to make up a family and scaled my "render test dummies" to match
them.  Then I costumed them in what seemed like reasonable cave people
costumes, and rendered a test "family photo" to see them all.  They were
then added to the cave, and posed to match my original idea.

I tried revising a macro I wrote for the Gardens round, to produce trees,
but had a problem with a bug in it.  So I downloaded Gilles Tran's
Maketree macro and made some nice trees with that.  However, the trees
in this scene are so far away you wouldn't be able to see the details
anyway, even if I had enough memory to #include them.  I used the
bounding boxes of the trees produced by the macro to make simpler
tree substitutes and used those instead.  The substitutes were much simpler;
much much simpler :-) .  

I made a very sketchy mammoth and put some of them in the scene.  But
they were impossible to see, so I took them out again without ever
getting them to look good.

I made a simplified rook, which has more detail than the mammoth, and
put five of them into the scene.  You can't see the details, but the
birds are at least visible :-) .

This has been the most confusing IRTC entry (for me) that I've done.
Moving the viewpoint inside the cave meant all my x and z coordinates
were reversed from the way I normally have them.  This really confused
me when I was trying to position the cave people.

Oh well... this entry doesn't have anything to do with the village setting
I've been working on in previous rounds.  I could claim that the village
would be built near here in several thousand years time, but the point
is, none of the modelling for the village was used for this scene.