Slashdolt wrote:

>I've had mixed feelings about the farm myself.  But since I live in an area
>surrounded by farms, it was an easy place to get inspiration.  I would
>slowly drive by silos on my way home from work.  Many of them are rusty,
>which gives them much more character.  I hope to do a farm scene some day.
>Or perhaps several scenes.

I also live in a rural area and the weathered wood and rusted metal roofs
are very beautiful, in their own way. I've seen a lot of computer generated
scenes taking advantage of that, some of them quite realistic.

>The sunlight was quite yellow.  Additionally, there is a big yellow spot in
>the sky around it.  The grass began to look really blue when the radiosity
>would reflect it from the blue sky.  I made the sky a little more
>grey-white, and added the yellow gradient.

The sky sphere often overpowers scenes using radiosity in POV-Ray. Perhaps
the sun isn't bright enough?

>The fence was originally taller and closer.  It's only about 40" tall, IIRC.
>Any shorter, and it would have been less realistic.  It's also a few yards
>away from the radios, though it's difficult to tell.

Looking at the scene after reading this, I see what you say. I guess the
fence design has the appearance of a taller fence, or perhaps the corn
stalks are not as high (or as close) as I'd assumed, throwing off my
perception of the size of the radios as well.

>I spent countless hours working on the textures and finishes. Even so, I'm
>not 100% satisfied.  Maybe 90%.  I'm going from memory, but I believe the
>wood texture was a granite and bozo texture stretched out to look like a
>wood grain.  Then I overlayed a stretched agate pattern on top of that, for
>the color variation.  I tried using the woods.inc, but eventually abandoned
>it, and made my own.  Some of them also had turbulence added.  Then I used,
>"warp {repeat 2*x flip <1,0,0> " to flip-flop the textures to look like wood
>veneer.

I almost never get a good wood from wood, but use wrinkles and granite.

>Some things that went wrong...
>* Lighting:  It's too dark, imho, and I ran out of time before I could
>figure out what to do about it.
>* Focal blur:  A small amount of focal blur was necessary or the image_maps
>of the grille cloths looked very bad.  For the final render, I had set blur
>samples to 200, but it would have probably taken 3 months to render.  I
>ended up leaving it at 50 samples.  That caused some graininess, especially
>in the large background tree in the middle.

I was wondering how the grill cloths looked so good. Excellent work. POV-Ray
always forces us to compromise one thing for another. I've been fighting AA
as well, wanting sharp textures but no obvious stair stepping.

>Overall, I tried to do this without using things like Poser, X-frog,
>pre-built models etc.  Probably because I don't own any of those things. ;-)
>But more to the point, since I don't own those things, I wanted to show
>what's possible using just POV-Ray, and a few other simple, mostly free
>tools.  I think some of the scoring may have taken that into account, but
>that's just my feeling.

I also like to use POV-Ray only, partly because I'd like to learn what it
can do. Once I think I've learned how to use its many tools, then I'll
branch out to add/use others. Or maybe just buy Maya!

>Finally, I'd like to thank my wife, Angela (aka Mrs. Dolt), for supporting
>me on this.  It can get lonely coming home from work and spending the next 5
>hours working on an IRTC entry.  Lonely for both of us.  That may be why
>Gena's "Lonliness" entry had such an impact on so many.

Congrats on your hard work well rewarded. I'm looking forward to retirement
when I can play with POV-Ray all day!

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