TITLE: Silent Lake
NAME: Joerg Schrammel
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: schrammel@mail.rhein-ruhr.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.rhein-ruhr.de/~schrammel/index.htm
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jslake.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    PoV-Ray Version 3.00.msdos.wat-cwa

TOOLS USED: 
    Gforge, The Genesis Toolkit

RENDER TIME: 
    about 10 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166MHz, 40MB-Ram,
PEAK MEMORY USED:  25MByte
NUMBER OF OBJECTS: 21506


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


At first this scene should be just a test of the new features of the Genesis 
Toolkit. But when i noticed that the current topic for the IRTC was 'nature', 
i thought that i should participate. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The height field for this scene was created with GFORGE.
Some modifications of the HF where done with HFMERGE (1) 

I used GEN (1) to create an include file, containing all objects 
(like trees, grass, rocks) which are located on the surface of the height 
field. 
The plants and rocks are part of the Vegetation Package for Genesis.
They consists of very simple shapes and are designed to be small in memory,
so that a large amount of them can be used in a landscape scene.
The new coniferous tree (in the center of the image) was designed by 
Stig Bachmann Nielsen and is now also part of the Vegetation Package.

I made a lot of tests to find a good location for the camera. 
When i got the right location i decreased the total number of objects using 
the new tool CUTTER (1). 
The include file was very large and had more objects than my systems 
memory could handle. 
CUTTER reads the include file (created with GEN) and decides on every object 
whether it is visible for the camera or not. It writes a new include file 
containing only visible objects.
This new include file has now about 21000 objects, which can be handled by
my computer.

After that, i added some clouds and fog, and i used the focal blur feature 
of PoV-Ray to smooth the distant hills and the foreground objects.


(1) The programs GEN and HFMERGE are part of the Genesis Toolkit
    CUTTER will soon be added to the toolkit after i've finished the 
    documentation for it. The Genesis Toolkit is freeware and available 
    on my homepage.