TITLE: Food Chains 101 NAME: Dale E. Cieslak COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: dcieslak@yahoo.com WEBPAGE: http://members.tripod.com/~DCieslak TOPIC: First Encounter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: food101.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows TOOLS USED: sPatch, Photoshop RENDER TIME: approximately 50 min. HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100 MHz, 2MB Matrox Millenium IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The worm, seeing a fish for the first time, says, "I'm new here. Wanna do lunch?" DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Ever wonder what a worm thinks when it sees a fish for the first (and last :)) time? Well, you shouldn't. Worms can't see. :) In spite of that, I used that as the central theme for my IRTC entry. The fish, worm, hook, bottle, and line were all modeled completely in sPatch. The worm, hook, and line were in the same file, but the fish and the bottle were in their own separate files. Putting each object on its own sPatch layer made assigning textures very easy. I was quite happy, because this is my first decent image resulting from sPatch. I drew the texture and bump maps for both the fish and the worm in Photoshop. The bottle, hook, and line were just given simple textures. The sea floor is a heightfield, generated using the Photoshop "Clouds" filter and blurred. The texture is a 'bumped' using the normal modifier, and the color is the Starfield texture modified to kinda look like sand. I added blue- green fog to get the murky water look. I used multiple lights from above, hoping to get better caustics (they don't work well with area lights), but they came out very subtle. I have another light (very dim) coming directly from the viewer to lighten up the shadows and to make the overhead lighting less harsh. Unfortunately, I think that also contributed to the washed-out caustics, but overall, I think the underwater feeling is pretty good, considering the cartoony feel of the image.