The pictures

All fullsize versions of the following images have been scaled down to 640×480. I left fairly a bit of quality in the images, so there shouldn’t be any JPEG-artifacts. This page is ordered newest on top to oldest down at the bottom of the page!

I was getting suspicious about the size of this page, so I just checked it, and although it’s becoming pretty big lately, it’s still only 78k images +17k text, which makes it smaller than 100k. I consider this an acceptable size, even for 28k modem-connections. Via my ISDN connection, this page loads in well under 10 seconds. In case anybody should complain about this page though, I will consider splitting it up. Just send me a note

I’ll put up some of the sources as soon as they make it thru’ POV 3.0.

Submarine

After a major computer-overhaul, I’m currently back at this scene. I accidentally did a backup of an old Moray-Directory and found myself with a stone old version of the scene-file. Some redesign did really good to the model - as you can see here - and the scene is currently evolving quite fast.>

More to come…

Heightfield-Objects

A question on CGRR led me to create this tutorial on how to position a camera inside a heightfield.

Be my Bloody Valentine

Work in progress, final image still defective… work in progress, final image still defective … work in progress, final image still defective …

This is one came back to my mind year after year, but I never managed to get to it on time. Bah, who cares, here it is.

All the modelling was done with the new Windows Moray. Texturemaps / bumbmaps / heightfields were created using the Gimp, except for the two floortextures, which I found in my archive, but haven’t got the source anymore. The filenames are dc302339.tga and dc302416.tga, and they were declared as free for noncommercial use, so thanks to whoever provided them.

It’s the first time I made heavy use of imagemaps, and I’m rather pleased with how well this works. It’s astounding how inaccurate you can work, to make things still look good. For example, take the bloodstain on the knife’s blade (Netscape dumps the alpha-channel, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea).

The image to the right is the material map version. The puddle is by far too fuzzy, and the writing looks not the slightest bit like liquid.

The heightfield version above is much better in these regards, but it has some clipping problems, that create this kind of rim around the Message. The puddle starts to look ok, but the hand is too visible, too large, and could need a bit of smearing.

The lighting is always a big problem for me, so I did some test shots.

After I modelled most of the interior, I did some test-shots to get the lighting right. These two shots show, how simple changes can create an entirely different mood.

The second shot has a blueish fill-light in the back of the camera, which finally led me to the TV that can be seen in the next few shots

Yes, that’s what I was looking for. This is the final lighting shot, without the interior, except for the new TV, which has now replaced the fill-light

And here’s the complete scene as seen from the light-camera, with all the interior. That’s the final shot only from a different perspective.

Finally, here’s the first quqlity shot I did for this image, which had the following problems (many of which are already fixed by now) in no special order:

• The heart has to be turned to see the blood-vessels. Right now, it looks just like some blobby thing.

• The table needs some blood puddle, and perhaps some smeared fingerprints

• The table legs share the same plane with the table’s glass plate, so you can see their inside.

• The knife’s grip needs some work - and blood for that matter.

• The writing needs more transparency and more phong.

• The TV, vice versa to the couch is still missing. It should add some blueish light to the scene. After this, the light of the lamp in the back should be reduced, or at least its falloff be increased.

• The floor texture needs better positioning

PS: Switching harddisks sucks, I WANT MORAY FOR LIIIIIIINUX ! ! !

Elevator Shaft

Warning, you need a properly calibrated gamma setting to see anything here

This one is a view down an elevator shaft, inspired by a movie I saw on TV some days back - can’t remember which one though @-).

The first version of the lamps was a real mess, which was replaced by something that resembles the ones in our basement rooms. Then more stuff was added, to get rid of the empty, clean look.

I was still not pleased with the overall look, when I switched my monitor back on, after doing a quality shot overnights. The monitor slowly got brighter after being cooled off, and when I saw that dark look, I went working on the lights.

I increased the fade_power, while decreasing the fade_distance of the lights. Then a subtle atmosphere was added.

A colleague of mine found the highlights on the wall a bit too aggressive, but actually it was exactly the type of material that I had in mind.

The mood is totally different now, and I’m quite happy about how the scene came out in the end.

Wooden Toy Train

After playing around with some other stuff, I thought it’s time to finish this one.

It’s put into an proper environment now, and has improved lightning, but I’m still not really happy with it, because the toy train that was supposed to be the focus of the image is now too small for my taste.

However, I’ll leave it this way until I know how to do it better.

Here’s the old version to compare the two. The cow texture hasn’t been improved, although it should have been. I had to remove the beveling of the cows and trees, because I ran out of memory, and the gain was nearly no longer noticeable, when I move them to the back of the table.

Then I got rid of the bloody checker floor, and replaced it with what I called Green_Cloth. It’s a bit flat, but I didn’t have the patience to create a height-field for that purpose.

The cows don’t look all into the same direction anymore

Perhaps I’ll add some detail shots later…

Funny that this actually is the first thing that I really did with Moray after being a registered user for about 2 years.

Submarine, old version

Again a work in progress. Although train.jpg isn’t finished, this one came to my mind, and I just had to try it out. It’s the first time I did something with heightfields, but I’m not really happy with it by now. However, it’s a first sketch.

This is the second one done with moray, but this time with heavy hand-tweaking afterwards - to get the atmosphere stuff right…

Ah, and hfval.pl was used to position the sub above the heightfield.

Positioning objects on top of a height field

Follow this  link to find a utility, that calculates the height of one or more given points of a heightfield. This is a sample image of this tool.

Flight through a grid of things

Sorry, I’ve lost the mpeg during one of my provider-to-provider moves. I’ll rerender them sometime in the near future.

Grid revisited! After receiving an encouraging message from David R. Ramirez, on who’s page I’ve been, and who was so kind to visit my site after that, I couldn’t resist doing that.  It took me quite a while to get to it, but I think it came out quite nicely in the end. Thanks for the suggestion Dram!

This is a flythrough of the now POV 3 enhanced grid. It also has a emitting sparkle-thingy, that’s trying to escape from the camera. The grid itself is now illuminated by a colorful emitting halo.

Note: gridrock.pov requires two include files:

To render the animation, use the ppmmpeg.ini provided with POV. This requires the pbmtools package and a mpeg encoder. Windows folks are on their own here, sorry.

The other file required is
href=”http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434”>Chris Colfax’s Spline.inc.  I suggest getting his plug-ins anyway, they’re all great!

The Evert Transformation

Source (2k)

I hope I won’t get into any trouble for this one: I once saw this transformation in a TV feature about computer animations.  Thinking that it looked really cool, I soon forgot about it. Then, surfing around, looking for some piece of mathematical software, I stumbled over the Geometry Center that created this animation. They had a downloadable C source of the program that could generate the dataset for a given time during the transformation, and after a bit of perl and shell scripting, a had a converter to output POV format. Here’s are the resulting image and animations.

Actually, the texturing is not at all as in the original: the Geometry Center’s animation had different colors for the inside and the outside of the sphere, making the result of the transformation pretty obvious.  Sadly, I couldn’t find any way to do this coloring, so I just added some coloring, just for the looks.

Note: If it’s a copyright violation to put the self-created animation onto these pages, please inform me, and I’ll take them off. People should talk with each other, not with each other’s lawyers

More note: The source includes the shell- and perl scripts, and the POV source, but not the program source to create the dataset. This can instead be found here!

Abysmal Kitchen Sink

This one became a Sysop’s pick of the week on CIS.

It’s - as you most probably might have guessed by now - The Abyss inspired. It’s completely hand-modelled and includes texture-maps, bump-maps and a lot of CSG for the sink itself.

Besides of all the CSG, I always liked how the water-texture came out.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Geez, mahn. I was so proud of this one! I created it when I just got my CIS account.

Once I got the hang of how CSG works, I just had to try this one. I tried to upload it to CIS’s GO GRAPHDEV, where all the other POV folks lived, but it got rejected because of copyright reasons.

When I found the source for this image on my backups, I actually contacted Mr. Hofstadter and asked him for his permission to copy his bookcover. He said it’s ok for noncommercial usage - which this image is indeed - so I put it up here, and to CIS’s new GO POVRAY too.

This was kind of a test that I did with a friend of mine. He had an Amiga, and was proud owner of Imagine. We thought this would be a nice scene, that we both could easily design, so I created it with a little program, my friend tried it with imagine.

Unfortunately, RAM was expensive these days, And his Amiga didn’t have a FPU by that time, so the Imagine-Version of that image never made it to life. I think this was POV-1.

There are no fancy textures or other stuff in here, but it’s still one of my favorite backdrop-graphics/3d_gallery.

The infamous Click-Clack-Toy

This was my very first finished image - it’s been exactly between POV 0.5b and 1.0 - I still have the toy.dat file with things like viewpoint/end_viewpoint, or object/end_object. But I translated it into the new curly-braces syntax later.

I didn’t have a CIS account by that time, didn’t know anybody else who was into raytracing, and found that no books existed about the topic.

As you can see, handling light wasn’t much of my thing by that time, but even today, I’m proud of how the wires are tied to the top-frames - it’s all tori, and there wasn’t a torus-keyword by that time: these are quartics!

It always annoyed me that I didn’t think of translating the textures on the spheres differently, but it took so long to render that I left it the way it was.

One day, I’ll redo this image.

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