Artist:             Jamie McCarter
                    50ve3gso@qstar.fanshawec.on.ca
Filename:           Jm-Dare.Jpg
Quote:              After the dare, Morton was never again seen in school.
Rendering Time:     On my 486dx2-66 with a region size of 86 Megs (mostly
                    virtual memory) an anti-aliasing at 0.4 it took 4 hours
                    9 minutes to render.
Programs Used:      GUM, PoV-Ray, Blob Sculptor, Font3d
Subject:            For the April PoV Competition's `Food' subject.  The
                    worm is food, and soon the fish.
Other Stuff:
     The idea has gone through a few changes until finally arriving at this
final product.  While sitting eating `food' I noticed the robins outside
were chasing the worms.  I drew some sketches of a possible scene from the
point of view of the worms looking out their holes at the robins as they
came looking for food.  I wasn't pleased with what I had drawn so when I
fed my fish and I noticed how gullible they were to anything that moved
near the top of the aquarium, I changed my idea.  The robins became fish
and the worms, well they became dead worms on hooks.  I thought of the
quote in English class (supposedly I was reading King Lear), and the guy
behind me (Ian) suggested I use the name Morton.
     I was used to modelling within Moray, but I had just received the
registered version of GUM.  So I figured I'd give it a try.  I anticipated
that learning a different modeller would pose many problems, but thankfully
it didn't.  Actually it solved a few that I would have had using Moray. =)
     I first created the bobber and hook as I figured it would be the
easiest.  Plus it allowed me to quickly asses the power of GUM.  I created
the mesh easily and quickly.  However, while rendering all of what should
have been torii became either cubes or just vanished.  I was using PentPoV
for speed so I changed back to the official PoV-Ray hoping it would solve
the problem.  It didn't.  I was stumped for a couple days, until finally I
re-read the torus section in the PoV docs.  There I saw the section about
using the `sturm' keyword if things didn't work.  I added it to all my
torii and voila.  I had torii.
     Next I created the surface of the water and the terrain beneath.  I
used fog to simulate the opacity of water, however I was unpleased with the
result.  I wanted clear water for a while and then a sudden drop into
darkness.  So I faked the fog with an onion texture on both the surface of
the water and the terrain.  I then increased the distance on the fog to a
much greater distance and it achieved the desired effect.
     For the ripples surrounding the bobber I knew they should diminish in
size the further they extended.  The standard ripples effect of PoV
couldn't achieve this, so to overcome this obstacle I wrote a program (in
QBasic) to output a sine wave in the form of a colour_map.  I then used the
sine colour_map as the base texture and overlaid it with another onion
texture that grew darker the further out it went.  This I rendered as a
height_field and merged it with plane for the water surface.
     The worm I created in Blob Sculptor (for Windows) and I gave it a
radial texture to further simulate the worm segments.  I kinda guessed on
the right colouring as I didn't want to go drown a worm.  The fishermen
around here tell me it looks good, so I guess I have a natural instinct to
drowned worm textures.  Yech.
     I then created the fish which I based loosely on the Disney style -
with large eyes and eyebrows to express most of the feelings.  I found it
challenging to give them the proper facial expressions and positioning. 
Plus all the Disney characters are 2d, and creating one in 3d was a new
challenge for me.  Once I had created the eyes and eyebrows I used bezier
patches (oh, I long for NURBS) to mould the body.  I was used to the Moray
method of Bezier modelling and I found GUM a bit different.  Still, it
worked fine and once I had connected all the bezier patches everything went
as planned.  One problem I ran into was in texturing.  In PoV-Ray v2.2 it
seems that one can't specify the number of times a image wraps around the
cylinder, so I had to create the image_map with redundant pictures.  The
final image_map was something like 1100x100 rather than 100x100 because of
this.
     I created the font using Font3d v1.49 (?) which was fairly easy.  The
back-bevel=off and back-face=off didn't work so I had to manually edit them
out of the 13 Meg data file.  I couldn't directly incorporate the text into
GUM because of the size, so I created dummy declares which referenced my
real declares.  GUM continues to give me warnings, but it worked.
     I then attempted to export the scene, however ran out of room.  So I
purged a few games and gave the data file to PoV-Ray.  After it finished
rendering I had difficulties in uploading the image as the computer with
the modem was being used.  To make matters worse it was April 30th.  To
overcome this I frantically phoned all my friends with 14.4s.  Thank you
Jason Slaughter!