TITLE: Sunken Temple
NAME: Gail Shaw
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: gail@rucus.ru.ac.za
WEBPAGE: http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za/~gail/
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sunken.jpg
ZIPFILE: sunken.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5 (conversion to .jpg and creation of a height
field)
            Leveller (creation of height fields)
            LParser (to create seaweed)
            wc2pov (to convert hammerhead shark from .3ds)

RENDER TIME: 
    12 hours 2 min, 43 sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 150

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A recent shift or the ocean bed has uncovered the remains of a city
that has been buried for millenia. A rowboat from a research vessel
approaches the ruins to investigate, but there are a few 
peculiarities in the environment.

Why is the shark swimming round and round? It almost looks like a guard
Why is the central structure in such good condition compaired to the rest 
of the buildings?
What is that haze eminating from the white block?
Where is that red glow coming from?
All is not as it appears to be....


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The buildings were created using pov primitives. The rough cutoff was
achieved by differencing the complete buildings with a height field.

The floor was created from multiple heightfields.

The seaweed was created with lparser, the lparser source being an adaption
of the fern example that comes with lprser.

The shark was converted from a .3ds file found at 
http://sunserver1.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~pannozzo/3dsobjects.html

The surface is two planes, one with refraction, one with caustics. The planes
had to be 
different due to a different scaling on the normal for refraction and
caustics.

The lighting is an area light above the surface, an area light within the white
block and
a shadowless lightsource behind the camera

I intended to add an atmosphere, but the scene would have taken over 10 days to
render, and 
I didn't have that much time.