TITLE: Spring Forest
NAME: Chris S.
COUNTRY: U S of A
EMAIL: chris@bluelectrode.com
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: spforest.jpg
RENDERER USED: 


  MegaPOV 0.5


TOOLS USED: 


  Photoshop 5 (jpeg conversion and heigthfield creation)


RENDER TIME: 
    39 hours 44 minutes 29 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 128MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Imagine, the dawn of a new day.  Stark winter winds have receded.  Tall
sentinels, with roots that seem to tunnel to the center of the earth, stand
watch over the land.  Once blanking the entire valley, deep snow has now melted
away.  Boulders deposited in the creak beds by glaciers long past, are now
drowning in the runoff.  Already some meager vegetation has taken advantage of
the early winter thaw.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I first started with a basic idea...a lush forest full of vegetation.  I then
experimented for weeks, scribbling ideas on paper, until I found a suitable
layout.  Once armed with this layout, I began in POV to add the first elements
to my scene.  This is actually the first time I've gone completely without a
modeler cold turkey.  IMHO I don't know how I could have done this _with_ a
modeler since I used POV's powerful scripting abilities most of the time to
place objects.  BTW, I even made the signature in POV, all CSG and
sphere_sweeps.  Yeah, go POV!

First, a heightfield envisioning a rudimentary creak bed was laid as the basis
for my scene.  Then trees, focussing on the intricate layout of the root
structures were created by a macro brandishing sphere_sweeps.  Thanks go to
Marcus Ramst for getting the basics in that macro to work.  The water was
created using a specifically textured box.  The larger boulders are blobs
placed in precise locations.  Almost everything else is randomly placed using
macros and the trace() function.  

To be honest, I was aiming for a "lusher" forest than the one pictured here, but
I miscalculated the appropriate scaling for the most dominate grass layer and
then didn't have time enough after a 39+ hour render to fix my mistake before
the deadline.  Oh well, would you believe early spring;)  Some light fog, two
area lights, radiosity, and antialiasing round off the scene.  Should anyone be
interested, the code is available per request.