EMAIL: p_chan@shaw.ca
NAME: Philip Chan
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: In Remembrance is Hope
COUNTRY: Canada
WEBPAGE: www.ucalgary.ca/~phichan/index.html
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 (Windows)
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop LE 5.0
RENDER TIME: 11m 42s
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2400+ XP, 256 Mb DDR RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The twentieth century is sometimes referred to as the
century of war.  Will the twenty-first be the herald of a golden age, or the
harbinger of decay?  In remembrance is hope.

This image depicts physical decay as well as abstract decay.  The crumbling
buildings of a ruined city, the rusting tank and road sign, and the fading
images of the past come together to depict the decay of civilization and
society.

The images chosen depict memorable moments from the two World Wars - the
sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in 1945.
The third image depicts the event that is arguably the catalyst for much that
has happened in the current century - the terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center in 2001.

While the desert-like environment may at first suggest a reference to current
events in the Middle East, the text on the road sign is designed to dispel this
idea.  The setting is a distant future, but by no means does the image suggest
an unavoidable future.  Two elements in the image purposefully go against the
theme of decay:  the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, and the tiny plant as a
symbol of hope.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The pictures used for image maps are taken from the following websites:

Lusitania
Lusitania Online (http://www.lusitania.net/torpedo.htm)

Hiroshima
A-Bomb WWW Museum (http://www.csi.ad.jp/ABOMB/RETAIN/exp.html)

World Trade Center
NewsMax.com (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/9/155519.shtml)

Most of the objects in this image are either isosurfaces or created using
Composite Solid Geometry (CSG) with primitives (spheres, cones, boxes, torii,
cylinders, and planes).  The two exceptions are the terrain (height field) and
the plant (sphere_sweeps and lathes).  The image also makes heavy use of
layered textures.

This image is created entirely within POV-Ray's built in text editor.  The 
objects in this image are created entirely using Composite Solid Geometry
(CSG), using primitives (spheres, cones, boxes, cylinders, planes, cones, 
torii), a few prisms, and a couple of text objects.  The textures are all
procedural, with the exception of one image map (which was itself created in
POV).  This image map was used to create the reflected scene visible on the
IRTC medals.

The lighting uses a parallel area light (to simulate very distant light source
and give soft shadows).  Two layers of fog are used (one constant fog and one
ground fog).  The image is brightness adjusted in Photoshop.

A more detailed and technical description of individual components follows:

Walls:

The walls in the lower right are made of two isosurfaces (one for each
direction).  The function begins with a simple function to control the base
height of the wall, which shrinks along the axis.  One of the functions 
contributes a relatively small amount, and is used to create the rough look.
The other only varies along the same axis as the wall, and is used to make the
height shrink randomly.  Instead of just being clipped by the bounding box on
both sides, the side facing the camera also has its behaviour defined so it
slants sharply downward.  This allows a noise function to be applied in order
to give it a rougher appearance.

The distant walls use three noise functions, all of which are to control the
height of the wall.  The first has a high magnitude, and is used to make parts
of the wall missing.  The other two contribute varying degrees of noise to the
height.  All three functions only vary along the same axis as the wall, and the
other two components of the pigment function are used to make the noise
patterns differ.

The near walls use a texture I created for another project a while ago.  The
distant ones just use a solid grey pigment.

Pictures:

More isosurfaces, using a pigment function to create the worn edges.  The image
maps have their brightness increased in Photoshop to grey out the blacks.  A
texture with a yellowish colour and filter values is added on top of the image
map.  A crackle normal gives the wrinkled look.

Poppy:

Simple CSG with solid colour pigments.  The petals are actually just a cylinder
with spheres capping the ends.  

Plant:

Two sphere_sweeps for the base, and lathe objects for the leaves.  Also uses a
solid colour pigment.

Tank:

The tank is composed entirely of CSG with primitives.  Nothing really of note
except for the shattered glass on the camera dome, which is the difference of a
sphere with a bunch of randomly placed boxes.

The base pigment for the tank generates "suspicious expression after rgb"
warnings because it uses a long equation to fade colours from colors.inc.  On
top of this layer is a grey filtering texture to fade some areas more than
others.  Finally, because none of the patterns could generate the rust spots
without them being regularly spaced or looking like the rust on the unpainted
parts, there are 48 layers using the cylindrical pattern, which repeats once
for the rust spots.

Road Sign:

CSG to create the rounded edges, and the object pattern with a text object to
print the text on the sign.  A fading layer is then added (similar to the one
for the tank), and 3 layers of rusted scratches, each rotated and translated
and rotated differently to make the patterns different.

Rocks:

The ones in the foreground are isosurfaces with a sphere function as the base
object, and two pigment functions for noise.  The placement, size and noise
level of the rocks is generated randomly, using the trace function to find the
height of the ground at each point.  These rocks use the same texture as the
near walls.

The far rocks are spheres.  The placement and size are generated randomly like
the near ones.  These use a solid colour pigment.

Terrain:

The ground is a height field (generated with the leopard pattern), and a plane.
This height field is differenced with a box so the ground is smooth where the
pictures are (so they don't get covered).  The transition here is hidden by the
near walls.  The texture is a granite pattern, with small dark and light spots
to create a sandy look.  I originally wanted to use some focal blur to draw
attention to lower right, but this "blurred out" the ground texture, making it
look monochrome.