EMAIL: milco2002@hotmail.com
NAME: Malcolm Findlay
TOPIC: Before and After

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Passing Away
COUNTRY: Scotland
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray version 3.6
TOOLS USED: Photoshop to crop image and convert to Jpeg
            Wings 3D used to render poppy petals
            Gilles Tran's Make Grass macro was used (you guessed it) to make the grass

RENDER TIME: 20 minutes 27 seconds    + ~15mins for soldier picture
HARDWARE USED: Sony laptop - processor 1.73GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:Many ideas came to mind with this topic and early on I decided I wanted to convey both the before
                  and after in the same scene. This sparked off several ideas relating to before and after war and
                  death, hopefully I have managed to convey these in my picture. It tries to convey the liveliness,
                  beauty that exist before death which post-death becomes a mere memory and shadow of  these things.
                  I have included the flower to help represent the idea of passing from liveliness to so much less.
                  I posted this image on the images section of the povray website and received a comment about the 
                  symmetry of the whole scene however decided to leave it be as I perceive it as nicely demonstrating
                  the lack of individuality and the monotony(?) of death. As hopefully all have noticed there was also
                  a subtler tone of other things that have passed away recently! This hopefully adds a little humour
                  to an otherwise downcast image.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image idea is based centrally around quite simple methods however I have thrown into this image quite a few 
techniques that I have learned recently. Sadly I havent perfected either my tree or grass macros to a standard 
worthy of a 3D-RTC image yet. (Both macros are half finished on my computer in waiting for that point in life when I 
have time to complete them). This means that I have used Gilles Tran's Make Grass macro for that element of the 
picture. More interestingly are a few other elements:

Picture: This is a raytraced image that I have image mapped onto a box. I have included the image used in the zip
         file as I used a slightly unusual technique of taking one of my manikins that I used in my 'Tina Chep Evolution'
         picture and then applied a covering of blobs to the surface to smooth out the cracks and joins in the
         manikin a create a kind of clothed appearance. I was rather pleased with the outcome and may well use the 
         technique in future so as to save rendering more complex figures from outside of Pov-Ray. 

Flower: This is simple however the petals of the flower were fun to make as this was my first ever trial of Wings 3D.
        I felt it was time that I experimented with Wings to see what the posibilities were, it is I expect a rather
        trivial little use of wings but I am still getting used to using it.

All the rest of the image was fairly simple however even so I hope you enjoyed my image!

Also I would lke to thank Tek from the newsgroups for his advice on lighting and such in this scene. I am stll not 
entirely happy with the lack of constrast between the stones colour and the clouds and also the writing appears more
deeply cut on the left hand side even though it is evenly indented. However a big thanks to Tek as he certianly helped
me improve matters.