December 16, 1999
Details need to be fixed but the picture seems on the right track. Now that the tower structure is lighter, it's also a see-through, which means that some of the buildings that were hidden by the previous one must be completed. A little stone pavement is still missing.
December 17, 1999
Still cleaning up some details. Big-size render shows that the tree now casts hard shadows on the walls. No shadow doesn't work properly (the tree becomes too bright). Area lights are necessary. Test with area light makes the render time twice long (in the 12 hours range) on a Pentium 200. Next step : who is going to populate the garden ?
December 18, 1999
The population of Eden is two. Adam & Eve, how original. It will look a lot like a previous picture, Last date before the end of the world, but after all I don't want animals out there. The doe and chimps are out. I load Poser and create my first Eve. Convert her to mesh and put her in the scene. Wow, that's much better than I thought it would be (you never know with Poser figures, sometimes they look plain ugly). I spend a few hours trying to figure out the best position, however...
December 20, 1999
What's still needed ? Apples. The foliage file from MakeTree is imported to Excel, and one leaf out of ten is kept, and replaced by an apple. How to make an apple ? I don't want another 1 Mb mesh file. A sphere is all right for tests, but I'll go for something more realistic. I first settle for a lathe object, that gives a nice apple shape, but too regular. Also lathes may add to the render time and 4000 of them are needed. Back to good old CSG : two thick torii are "quartered" them : each quarter is given a different scaling to obtain an asymetric shape when you glue them back together. Crude and obfuscated CSG below:
#declare QApple=difference{union{difference{torus{1,0.95} plane{y,0} scale <1,1.3,1>} difference{torus{1,0.95} plane{y,0 inverse} scale <1,3,1>}} plane{x,0 inverse} plane{z,0 inverse}}I quickly got my apples in the tree, and, while I'm at it, I put a few ones on the ground for Eve & Adam to pick up.
December 21, 1999
Almost there. Paging Mr Adam. What should Adam do ? I contemplate for a few seconds having him reading the newspaper or watching TV. However, I don't want to spend few hours more building a paper or a TV to discover that it's barely visible. Adam will therefore do nothing, he'll just sit on the edge of the garden, while Eve will be picking apples. Another problem is the hairdo. Computer hairdos often look unrealistic. Since he's not going to be bald (got sick of bald Poser people), I have no better solution anyway. Back to Poser, I give him a ponytail and an apple (a ball actually). The tests are made at a bigger definition (1200 x 1600) so that I won't have any bad surprise the day I render this picture for a show. Now I need a better Eve, because I don't like the first, after all. She'll have an apple in hand too. Eve 2.0 seems OK immediately, demurely standing on her tiptoes. Some changes on the position of Eve. She's got a ultra-feminine behind that shines under the light, but very thick calves I don't like. No way she's going back to the drawing board though. Last minute changes : more apples, I fix the lights on the tower, and I had some normal perturbation to the tower's texture. Final render. Oops, I've forgotten to change the bars on the stairways and balustrades. And the signature...
Here is a close-up of our two friends. It reveals a lot of small mistakes but there's no time left to fix them.
December 26, 1999
Final render. It takes approximately 15 hours, because I have to stop and restart it to be able to use the computer for other works.
