TITLE: Lonely Beach
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/povray/
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmbeach.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmbeach.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 

    PaintShop Pro 5.1 (image maps, height fields, jpeg conversion)
    Oregon Beach photo by John Williams

RENDER TIME: 
    48m 54s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
The foreground is supposed to be quite dark. Adjust gamma for your
monitor if necessary, so that the granulated texture of the large slab
of sand at lower right is only just visible.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"A place where humans are insignificant..."
The meeting of land and water - a place where anyone can feel overwhelmed
by the vastness of the ocean, the sand, and the sky.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I struggled for over a month to think of a subject for this topic. I was
toying with an Antarctic scene when a net acquaintance pointed me at a
photo he had taken at a beach in Oregon, USA. Taking that as inspiration,
I adapted freely and produced this interpretation.

There are only a handful of objects in this image - most of the work is
done by textures and media. The beach is a height_field, hand drawn in
PaintShop Pro, and a torus. The ocean is just a plane, the stream another
plane at a slight angle so they don't coincide. The waves are toruses
with a leading edge of white foam with high ambient value.

The clouds are a simple bozo layer, overlaid with a slab of scattering
media. The sun is the only light source, and looks_like a blob object to
get the appearance of being heavily refracted by the atmosphere.

The girl's silhouette is an image_map, taken from the original photo,
mapped on to a height_field of the same silhouette, with a water_level
to cut away the surrounding area. I initially used a box, but the
transparent bits interacted with the media and produced a visible box.
The birds are modified pteranodons from my entry in the Imaginary Worlds
round last year.

As usual, this is all hand-coded in the POV-Ray text editor, with no
modellers. All the source code, height fields, and image maps are in the
zip file.