TITLE: Night Vision NAME: Darren Izzard (SeDi) COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: sedi@geocities.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/4156 TOPIC: Night COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dnightv.jpg ZIPFILE: dnightv.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 (Win95) TOOLS USED: sPatch (for splines), LParser (for the trees), GForge 1.3 (for the mountains), Paint Shop Pro 4 (for heightfield-editing, conversion to JPEG, and adding the title) RENDER TIME: 3 hours 28 minutes 26.0 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133, 10Mb IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A clearly non-photorealistic image, in which a man is shown looking up at some stars with a telescope on a balcony above a city. He's somewhat surprised to see the stars smiling back at him, and lowers the telescope from his eye in disbelief. Not perhaps the most original interpretation of "Night" - I can't imagine that mine will be the only "astronomer-with-telescope-looking-at-stars" submitted - but, on the other hand, I didn't really want to do a nightmare- style picture. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: A (very) full description is contained in the construction diary ("about.txt") in the ZIP for this scene. Anyone who's interested can look there for more info, but here are some brief "what-made-what" details:- * The astronomer was made entirely using sPatch, including his telescope. To avoid unnecessary modelling, I only made the bits you see (i.e. he has no face, no legs, no chest, no left arm...). I know there are shadows cast inside him - showing through onto his back - because of this, which would be easy enough to block out, but I actually think they make his shirt look good! * The stars' faces were also made in sPatch, but the five-pointed star shapes were made out of POV-Ray polygons. * The starfield in the background is a sky-sphere with a granite texture, modified from the "Starfield" texture which comes with POV-Ray (in "textures.inc"). The modification makes the starfield brighter, and looks much better when anti-aliased. * The crescent moon is a difference of two spheres. (Admittedly, this is a totally inaccurate model!) The craters and "seas" are provided by dents and bozo respectively. * The fractal trees were made using LParser. * The fractal mountain height field was made using GForge and Paint Shop Pro. * The town and its lights are made out of relatively simple POV-Ray objects, which are randomly positioned using loops and conditionals. The town buildings have a roughly circular distribution which bunches in the middle. * There are two ground fogs (blue and magenta) at different altitudes, which are helped in the background by a slight green gradient in the starfield. * The fence is made of one-unit-wide sections, duplicated in a line. The texture is a "sharp-edged" form of bozo, which I hope looks like peeled paint on rust. * The final image was rendered to 800x600, AA=0.3, then converted from TGA to JPG. People with more memory should naturally find it renders much quicker. ---