Making of "The wet bird" - Part 1

This "Making of" text deals with a picture called "The wet bird". This picture won the March-April 2000 round of the Internet Ray-Tracing competition (aka IRTC ). The topic was "The City". It was made using Megapov 0.4, a patch of POV-Ray managed by Nathan Kopp.

Concept

There are many city pictures in the Book of Beginnings. Cities are a favourite subject of mine, so that the IRTC "City" topic was somehow perfect.Too perfect actually, because it came at a time when I was of tired of making urban pictures. I didn't want to make another "something strange happens here" picture, or model another building. I wanted fresh ideas that would involve the use of new techniques.

However, after having tried with limited success a couple of purely "fantastic" ideas, it became obvious that the only good subject would be a real city, possibly one city that would need no introduction, no explanation, the very symbol of city life, well, the old Big Apple itself, New York City. There were many advantages to this choice. First, I had recent memories of the place. Second, there was an abundance of reference material, including many personal photos. Choosing a real city also meant that I had to do it as real as possible, and photorealism is something I had avoided to do until now in 3D.

Alternative versions: [1] [2] [3]
Close-ups: [1][2][3][4][5]

Of course, even with the city as the main attraction, the image still lacked concept. The Megapov documentation provided the solution: because meshes can be copied (almost) endlessly, they’re good candidates for motion blur. So here it was: the picture would be about New York (actually a fantasy twin), and it would involve a motion-blurred character. Since motion blur is primarily a photographic effect, it was another excuse to make the picture highly realistic. The character could be a ghost from the past : a human being, like a XIXe century lady, or even an animal. I briefly ran experiments with a deer, but I decided that I had made enough of "animals in the city" pictures. The character also could be a simple, hurried passer-by. In fact, I'm still not sure of what the blurred character really is.

First tests

Using a personal photo of Time Square as a basis, I did a first test image. The motion blur worked quite well, but the surroundings were terrible. In fact the original photo wasn’t artistic at all : it was precise but bland. So I went back to my collection of photos and books, looking for inspiration. Finding the right one took a couple of days. It was a photo of a NY avenue under the rain. It was quite blurred and imprecise (the whole bottom of the picture showed a dark compact mass of people with no visible ground) but it was telling me something important: there’s no need to actually model rain to obtain a rainy effect, at least in a still image. With the right colours and lighting, a proper fog and a good amount of blurring would do the trick. So I would use the image as a guide for the colour and shadow balancing. With the general atmosphere secured by the photographic reference, I would have more freedom to work on the picture’s many other elements.

Macros and sources

Atmosphere