TITLE: Earth XXS or the Dead and the Living Nature NAME: Ulf Schreiber COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: ulf.schreiber@gmx.net WEBPAGE: http://www.fen.baynet.de/ulf.schreiber/ TOPIC: Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: earthxxs.jpg ZIPFILE: earthxxs.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02 W95 (previews&design); Povpro (final renderings, I did not benchmark it on my K6, but it felt faster than regular POV until I saw how this Intel Proton compiled and _extremely_ pentium optimized version behaved on a P133. ) TOOLS USED: Leveller, for the height fields, Minesweeper for subjectively speeding up previews, various rulers, a calculator, and... moray for one single unused spline (I seem to prefer handcoding) RENDER TIME: Quite long, splitted and unsplitted, put together again and so on, about two days, maybe. HARDWARE USED: K6 233, (P133 only an unused partial rendering) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Nature - aren't this all those green things standing around everywhere? I htink most tracers thought this after reading the topic: An enormous jungle scene with excessive plantlife, some dead trees only scarcely viewable due to all the ivy climbing over it, and not to forget strange insects closely circling the camera over the wettest of all ground fogs ever. So I started: first I need some algorithms that create all the variety of plantlife, possibly reacting to other plants (evading or climbing them), and the rest goes ..hm... no chance for writing such a programme with my abilities, and if I had it's output would shurely demand a hundred times my ram (my first (and second and..) algorithmical plants where really ultra-ugly but huge). So I gave that project up and thought: Nature - why not also a dead rock? It is also nature, but nobody whould ever think of it as nature. Even empty space! Now that is an interesting subject, the contrast between living and the unpopular dead nature. At this time luckily a thought of the Gary Larson cartoon "Preserved Wildlife", the one with the embottled safari animals if you know it, made a swing-by manouever around the huge dead-rock planet that recently materialized in my mind. Then it crashed into the living nature opposing the rock and all three together formed this image in my mind: A small piece of living nature enclosed and preserved in a glass in contrast to a big dead-nature world outside of the glass. A bit like our wonderful blue (and more important a bit green) planet in the eternity of dead space. (OK, possibly space is not as dead, and there is life on other worlds and they are out there watching us and they are really annoyed that they can't by Coca-Cola on Alpha-Centauri which they so awfully much would like to 'cos they see all our TV commercials and so on, bla bla bla - mh - pedant) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I created the glass nearly completely by hand. The lathe spline I created in Moray was too inaccurate and slow, I had do correct it by hand using only the rough dimensions, and splitting the lathe into a CSG difference of two SORs, which made a huge speed increase. The SORs also have less errors, I found only one in the final scene (the strange horizontal line a bit below the horizon). As you can see, the glass has a normal perturbation added. The original (I have this glass standing directly beneath my keybord) has nearly the same effect and I think it looks quite well so. The two height fields where both created in the steadily growing Leveller hf-editor. The big dead one is put into the scene seven times to make the horizon less "cut". The floor in the foreground actually is a part of this hf. I think it is quite apropriate for a dead surface not to use a higher detail level for it, but this is shurely not the high art of scene-building. **I only included an untested lo-res TGA for this height field, the glass might fly or be _inside_ of the mountain! (Contact me for the huge if you are interested for whatever strande reason you find) The starfield is a bit of a RAM killer, it consists of real ambient spheres of different sizes put onto a semisphere around the position of the camerea. The plants are three include files written for this scene, used quite often. I don't think they are worth documentation for further use or anything, but if you have a particular faible for using primitive .INCs, feel free to copy my stile of calling them.. The lighting is a even more primitive one: only one single source in the entire scene which looks_like a sun, not very creative, but the caustics prove to be a very useful effect.