I Am the Giraffe of Your Dreams

No 3D today.  Just a little photo-manipulation practice in Photoshop CS5.

Embers

Reason 231 why I love my Mac:  it is compatible with my Wacom tablet.

The Fall of Spring

The Fall of Spring

Inspired while I sat on my front porch yesterday morning, sipping coffee and watching the sun rise.

Rendered in POV-Ray 3.7

How it was Made

Most of the real work was done beforehand in Photoshop.  To create the helicopter seeds, I simply scanned one–twice, in fact.  After scanning it against the normal white of the scanner cover, I scanned it again beneath a black sheet of paper.  That meant that I could take both images into Photoshop and use the “difference” blending method to create a grayscale bitmap for use as a translucency map.  With some tweaking, I created another grayscale image for use as a POV heightfield.

So the shape is simply the heightfield and the texture looks like this:

  texture {

    function {
      TF(x,y,z).gray  // My Translucency function, created from a bitmap
    }
    texture_map {
      [ 0.0

        pigment {
          image_map {
            jpeg "Heli-Pig.jpg" // 4838 * 1599
            map_type 0
            interpolate 2
          } // image_map
        }
        finish {
          diffuse .6 .9  // High translucency
        }

      ]
      [ 1.0
        pigment {
          image_map {
            jpeg "Heli-Pig.jpg" // 4838 * 1599
            map_type 0
            interpolate 2
          } // image_map
        }
        finish {
          diffuse .7 .2  // Low translucency
        }

      ]
    }
    rotate 90*x
    //scale -x
    scale -z
  }

Blue Planet

I haven’t had much time for POV renders lately, but yesterday I felt inspired to create a planet.  I started with the water, using a transparent sphere and blue-colored fade settings in the interior.  I then added an isosurface using the F_ridged function for the land forms.  The combination makes for nice variations in the water.

The atmosphere is the tricky part.  I found a cloud map based on satellite images and used it as a simple pigment map on a sphere just slightly larger than my planet.  It worked fairly well, but left a sharp shadow in the twilight zone rather than a more realistic and attractive fade into the shadows.  So instead, I used the cloud map to create a function, and used the function to control the media density in a thin cloud sphere (I used a difference of two spheres to limit the media to a thin layer over the ground).

For the general atmosphere, I wanted something that would be thickest at the surface of the planet but fade exponentially at higher altitudes.  The “exponential” part is the difficult one.  Here was my solution:

#declare SF =
function {
 pattern {
   spherical
 }
}

#declare SF2 =
function {
 pow( (SF(x,y,z))*2, 127)
}

By multiplying the spherical function by two and using an odd exponent, I could get the curve I wanted if the surface of the planet was .5 units from the function origin.  Trial and error proved that I needed larger exponent than I expected.

The lights on the dark side of the planet were accidental–I believe they are artifacts of the isosurface.   But, since they looked like they could be city lights, I amped them up a bit in Photoshop and ran with it.

Here’s the scene file:

PlanetTutorial

Of Rocks and Sand

This was one of my first attempts with World Machine, and I still like the result.  World Machine’s erosion filters are the most effective of the programs I have tried (Surprisingly, Vue’s erosion filters are utterly worthless!).  One of these days when I can get around to justifying it to myself, I’ll purchase the full version.

I use proximity as well as slope to determine sand placement, which I think worked very well in combination with the eroded terrain.

Here’s the scene file: OfRocksAndSand

Now for a deeper question–why do I find myself making desert pictures these days?

The Door

The Door is one of my favorites.  I did it quite some time ago and it is not perhaps as detailed as it could be and the render is full of artifacts, but I love the feel that it has.  I didn’t want the door to be foreboding; rather, I wanted a storybook feel.  I wanted there to be a sense that there was some kind of exciting yet mysterious world behind the door, waiting to be explored.

I drew the design for the door in Illustrator and exported it as a grayscale bitmap.  In POV, I created a function from the bitmap and used it to define a heightfield.  The stone wall is an isosurface, and the door frame is made of superellipsoids.  There is an unseen white box behind the camera which reflects light from the door onto the stone (via radiosity), which resulted in the curious effect that the stone looks wet.  The stone’s texture itself is neither reflective nor specular.

Although I used genuine ray-traced media when rendering, I still ended up doing some post-processing in order to refine the look of it.  In the end I had to combine several renders to make it look right.

The Endless Palace

This is a POV project of which I am particularly proud.  This particular image lacks something in composition and direction, but it is an example of the endless palace script I wrote in POV-Ray SDL.  The script draws from numerous macros and pre-built architectural objects to build buildings according to what objects and building are already around it.  For example, only if the current wall being built will open over the ground or a patio will it place a door rather than a window.  It chooses a random architectural object from within the allowed possibilities.

The script grew in complexity, however, when I found that pure random selection tended to create unseemly buildings.  To create the feel I wanted, I needed it to look “random” enough to seem like buildings were built individually, but with enough of a pattern to seem artistically and intelligently designed.

In the end, I rewrote the code such that everything was stored in a multi-dimensional array, and when building the North-facing wall of building section 3.8 on the third floor, it could go back and ask if the section at 2.8 was part of the same building and perhaps should use the same style windows.  This allowed the script to decide along way that the building at 4.4 should have a large dome, and re-write the array to see to it that the surrounding sections would fit appropriately.

The script went through many revisions, and you can see some of the working renders here.  Someday, when I have the time to go back and figure out what I was doing when I wrote it, I may go back and try and improve it further.  You can see an early version below.  To the right above is a frame from a animation I had attempted to render of a fly-through of one generated city.  If I can find it, I may post it sometime, although I’m sure it was 10 MB or more.

Ah,well, here’s a different animation:  Palace Fly-by (1.5 MB)

Crowded

“See the eighteenth building from the right?  No, the next one.  And then…let’s see…ten windows from the top, and the fourth window from the left; right, that’s the one.  No, I don’t live there–I’m not so fortunate to have a window room–I live behind it. ”

***

One of my favorite things about POV-Ray is the ability to write just a little bit of code that can fill a whole scene with objects, each one different from the next.  This scene is just a simple macro that creates randomly generated buildings.

Remnant

Remnant was created some time ago, primarily out of a need for a full scene to use the sci-fi building macro I had created.  The macro creates randomly generated round buildings like those in the scene, adding details like domes and “bulbs” at appropriate points.

After having posted on the POV-Ray forum, someone there requested that I submit the image for use in Vega Strike.  When I did so, they then requested that I provide the source for the image.  I did that, too.  Months later I discovered that they decided that the image didn’t actually fit into the game after all, since it didn’t match the architectural styles of the game’s cultures.

But, since I already have the source code and necessary images all neatly packaged, I’ll make it available here:  TektonArt_TheColony If you make some images with my code, I’d love to see it.

Certain effects, such as the lens glare/flare, were added in post-processing.