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This is my first serious image using Pov-ray 3.5, though I've used
earlier versions of POV for years, off and on.
It has a few artifacts, mainly due to being forced to use low-quality
settings to compensate for it being rendered on my obsolete 75
megahertz 486 computer with 24 megs of ram (this really teaches you
patience, believe me!)
This image used area lights to soften the shadow a bit, plus radiosity
to bring out the individual hairs and add some depth to the shadow.
POV's antialiasing works really badly for sub-pixel-sized objects, so
this image was antialiased by first rendering it at 800x800 resolution
(took close to two weeks to render at that resolution!) , then
shrinking it down to 400x400 with Irfanview's "resample" command,
using the b-spline filter to average the pixels together. It would've
antialiased better still at 1600x1600, but I'd need at least a Pentium
II to render that in any reasonable time. :)
The hairball itself is a modification of Chris Colefax's macro. The
hair color is my own modification of one of the stock POV 3.5 metallic
copper textures, with reflection removed. Real hair is shiny--just
look at any shampoo ad or commercial--and I've tried to add a little
of that to my hairball.
This was rendered in two stages, thanks to an earlier suggestion from
elsewhere on this server, as a 2-frame animation. The first frame
simply did the radiosity calculations, saving it as a file. Area
lights were turned off for the radiosity. Second frame was the final
rendering, loading in the saved radiosity file, turned off any
additional radiosity tracing (no additional radiosity rays calculated)
and turning on the area lights. This also allowed me to resume
rendering during power outages and computer crashes, etc., without
messing up the image. :)
Except for the blotchy shadow artifacts in the lower right corner of
the image, I think this came out fairly well.. :)
I'd use higher radiosity settings if it didn't mean extending the
rendering time from 2 weeks to 2 months.. :) Time for me to get a new
computer, methinks.. :)
Hope you enjoy!
--Richard Adams
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