EMAIL: rtc@dslewis.plus.com
NAME: David Lewis
TOPIC: Before and After
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: But which came first?
COUNTRY: UK (Portsmouth)
WEBPAGE: none yet
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: jpatch and paintshop pro
RENDER TIME: 32 min 52 sec
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2.6GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I was thinking of pairs of before & after items that could be put together
on a single still image, and the idea came to me of an egg hatching.
Pretty soon that reminded me of the old joke "which came first, the chicken
or the egg?".  It's the sort of thing grandads say to their grandchildren.
When you answer "the egg", they reply "but it must have been laid by a chicken"
When you answer "the chicken", they reply "but it must have hatched from an 
egg"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I did a concept sketch of what the end image might look like.
There are notes all around it about how to build each part.
The idea was always to have a lot of yellow/brown elements, with an
evening sunlight to tie the colours together.

The fence was an image I downloaded from http://www.accustudio.com/exchange/fm_texture.htm

I followed some of Jaime Vives Piqueres's methods, and used a heightfield
for it.  You should check out his www.ignorancia.net
I used PaintShop Pro (PSP) to greyscale the image for a heightfield, and to
lighten the middle of each plan, so that they are flatter than they would be.
The ragged edge at the bottom was something I just drew on by hand.

The floor is just a flat surface with some texturing.
The straw and seeds are randomly scattered on it.

The eggs are trivial geometry - two half-spheres glued together after one half
had been stretched a bit.

The chicken was the big job.  I modelled it in Sascha Ledinsky's JPatch 
modeller (0.4 Preview 1), which is great, and exported it to patch format.
The plumage is taken from a photo of a Buff Sussex that I found on the web,
and I hacked it about in PSP to make a seamless texture, which is also 
surprisingly easy.  The other parts are just procedural textures.

I've included the jpatch model in the zip file.  It's nothing special,
so I'm happy to put it in the public domain.

You can currently get JPatch at www.jpatch.com, and the only feature it
seems to be missing for a job like this is uv-mapping of images onto the
corners of the patches.  There's a nasty join at the bottom of the neck 
between feathers that run vertically and a rotated version pointing back 
down the body; I had to jiggle the textures around with a translate to
try to hide the hard line that appears there.

I also used PSP to sketch a chickenwire pattern, which is mapped onto a
box to cast shadows across the scene.  It only appears at quality level 2,
and I'm not sure it's an improvement.

The caption text was just typed in PSP, which I also used for the jpeg
conversion.

This text is typed in Crimson Editor (as if anyone cares), and the povray
scene was edited in the Povray for Windows IDE.

Currently playing on my music system: Wishbone Ash - Argus