TITLE: Mt. St. Helen's
NAME: Sean O'Malley
EMAIL: ffrog@geocities.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/~ffrog
TOPIC: History
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: helen.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows '95

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Paint Shop Pro (BMP-JPG), LPARSER, others

RENDER TIME: 
    4 hours, 35 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix 300 Mhz / 48 megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In July and August, 1980, Mt. St. Helen's in central Washington 
state exploded in an eruption that destroyed a large portion 
of the mountaintop and sent dust and ash hundreds of miles
around where it can still be found today.  Skeletons of dead 
trees not entirely consumed stand lifelessly at points around the
mountain.  Now the (extinct?) volcano sits cold and dormant while
the path torn out of the north face, formerly a channel for hot 
ash, rocks and boulders, has nothing collecting on it but snow...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The heightfield was made with help from actual geographical data 
from the USGS, modified with Paint Shop Pro and a DEM (Digital 
Elevation Map) viewer from the USGS. I also wrote a DOS program 
in Pascal to convert DEM files to POV-type heightfields and 
regular higher-brighter heightfields (it's available on my web 
page, including source).  The original data wasn't in DEM format, 
but others were for the area around the mountain. (Come to think 
of it, I don't know if the final image *shows* any of the area 
around the mountain!) The tree was made from an L-System. I decided 
not to include source because it's (obviously) not quite so useful 
without the height information, but to include that would be 700kb 
for the TGA or 2.74 megs for the USGS data.  The INClude file for 
the whole tree (most of which isn't visible) is over 5 megs.

The only technical difficulties I had with this image were the
DEM processing and the problem of the little white squares turning
up on the mountain for some reason.  They're not supposed to be
there and when I used the same type of heightfield in another image 
it worked properly.  It seems to be a problem with POV-Ray's surface
normal computing for smoothing heightfields, but I can't figure
it out.  They appeared even with a solid-colored texture - even when
sitting in almost full shadow with a dim light!  It's the only time
I'd ever encountered the problem and found no way to fix.  As for 
the little speckles in the focal blur, we all know what causes that. 
Setting the focus to higher quality would have DRASTICALLY increased 
processing time, but I'm sure anyone voting for this will be nice 
enough to forgive that. ;)