TITLE: Sunrise at Lake Solitude NAME: Mark Wagner COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/rengaw03/ TOPIC: Wilderness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mwsunris.jpg ZIPFILE: mwsunris.zip RENDERER USED: SkyPOV 0.1 alpha TOOLS USED: SDTSEPOV for heightfield conversion, Display for converting the final image to JPEG RENDER TIME: 6 hours 12 minutes 20 seconds HARDWARE USED: 400Mhz AMD K6-II with 128MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Lake Solitude is a mountain lake in Grand Teton National Park. At almost ten miles from the nearest road, it is the closest thing to true wilderness that can be easily found. Despite the existance of a trail to the lake, relatively few people find their way there, making Lake Solitude a pristine part of nature. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The basis of this image is the heightfields. Two heightfields are used, converted from SDTS Digital Elevation Models of the area, with a 30 meter resolution. My original plan was to convert the heightfields to isosurfaces and use interpolation and 3d noise to fill in the detail between the data points of the original heightfield. However, after a test render took ten hours to render, compared to five minutes for a heightfield, I decided that I didn't have a fast enough computer to use that technique. The textures used are entirely procedural, using a combination of slope-dependant and proximity patterns, in addition to more conventional patterns. A slight modification to the proximity pattern allows it to be used as a patina pattern, with the color of each point dependant on how exposed it is. This allowed me to put grass and snow into crevices in the rock. The rock is a fairly conventional granite pattern. The lake texture is based on angle-dependant blurred reflection, which does a good job of simulating the mirror finish of a perfectly still lake. The sky is a wavelength-dependant Rayleigh media. The glow around the sun is from Chris Colefax's Lens Effects include file. There are actually two glows, one behind the atmosphere with the sun that provides the reflection in the lake, and one near the camera to make the main glow sharper. The rock in the foreground is created from blobs. My original plan was to have a bird on the rock greeting the sun, but I didn't have the time to model the bird. SkyPOV, a custom version of POV-Ray based on the MegaPOV custom version, is designed around simulating atmospheric effects such as sunrises and sunsets. I plan on adding the ability to simulate effects such as heat waves, mirages, and sky illumination.