TITLE: The Flight of Impossible Dreams
NAME: Kevin Quinn
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
EMAIL: kevinq2000@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dreams.jpg
ZIPFILE: dreams.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray Modeller, sPatch, Ultimate Paint

RENDER TIME: 
    55 Minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    533 mhz Intel Celeron, 64 Meg Ram, Windows 98 (First Edition)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

For me, Surrealism is best exemplified by dream logic, the way that your dreams
make perfect sense while you are experiencing them, but seem completely
mysterious when remembered awake.  In my image, a toy pirate ship has sailed to
the edge of the world, and is continuing beyond, carrying the dreaming
passenger with it.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I used sPatch to model the pirate ship as a whole, and then broke it apart to
import it into Moray.  I used Moray to layout and tweak the scene, and to apply
textures.  The textures used are a combination of pre-made Moray textures,
tweaked pre-made textures, and textures made from scratch using Moray's texture
creator.  Image maps, used for the starry sky and the pirate ship's jolly
roger, were created with Ultimate Paint.  The rigging of the ship was done in
Moray with Keith Hull's plugin for the Chris Colefax "Link" include file.

The design of the scene is purposefully story-book like.  The ship is simple to
express the idea of a child's plaything, and the two-toned sky with the
over-sized stars is intended to feel like pictures in a story-book read to a
child right before sleep.  I shot the scene in "widescreen" for two reasons: to
make it feel 'cinematic,' and to add motion to the scene; the empty right-half
of the picture is about to be filled by the flying pirate ship.  The scene
should look dark on your computer, because I wanted to give the impression of
night.  I mostly used non-shadow casting lights with a blue tint, though
there's one light in the with a golden glow, to represent the stars.

This scene was one of the very first ideas I had, and most of my time was spent
modelling the ship, and trying to get the scene to look "just right."  To both
ends I owe much gratitude to my wonderful girlfriend Jill, who critiqued my
works-in-progress, let me bounce ideas off of her, and proofread this file.  I
really like how this image came out, and I owe her a lot for her help.