TITLE: Ghost ship
NAME: Adrian Lazar
COUNTRY: Romania
EMAIL: ady_@mailcity.com
WEBPAGE: vega.unitbv.ro/~lazara5
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ghost_s.jpg
ZIPFILE: ghost_s.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.01 (Windows)

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.01, Blob Sculptor 2.0a, SEA 1.3 for conversion to JPEG

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 27 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD 486DX5/133, 16 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


       There it is! Coming from nowhere, filling the air with strange noises
of overheated vapour and piston rods, leaving behind a greasy trail of smoke
which fades into the thick fog, this old gunship goes to meet her unknown
destiny. Up on the mast the Jolly Roger waves into the wind...
  But there is no one at the helm. And there is no one alive aboard. Not even
the captain, although he still sits on the bridge, looking forward to the next
pray...
  Pretty scarry, huh? Well, it's long since I wanted to build a ship and this
looked like a perfect opportunity. So why not ? Actually, the scarry part came
only after I realised that the ship alone looked quite common and something
was still missing.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


       The ship's body is mainly CSG. The hull is made of two sphers, cut a
little off the center. The lifeboat is just a scaled copy of the hull, with
a few elements added. The rusty plates are image maps (taken from a trueSpace
demo) and you could try to render the scene without fog to see them better,
believe me ,it is well worth the time.
  The Jolly Roger is a Bezier mesh with an image map made out of the beautiful
Windings font (really!). The smoke is in fact a blob made with Blob Sculptor,
whith a bozo pigment map.
  The sky is an ordinary sphere (it seems Moray doesn't support skyspheres
- yet), with a Stormy_Cloud_Sky texture from Moray's library. The water is
a plane with a layered texture (solid color and ripples).
  The projector's beam is a cone with a halo texture an a spotlight. I first
tried to use only the spotlight and assign a hallo to the whole atmosphere,
but the rendering time exploded. Then I decided to apply the halo only to the
cone. I think the result is fairly interesting, although it looks a bit too
concentrated. I wish I had enough time to toy a little with it, but my pretty
obsolete hardware doesn't allow it and the deadline is much too close.
  The 'captain' is a mesh I found at 3DCafe. I added him when I decided that
only the ship itself just won't do it.
  By the way, although you can't really see the water, I assure you it is
there. If you don't believe it, just remove the fog.