TITLE: Dolphin NAME: Andrew Swan COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: a.swan@ucl.ac.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~zcapr21 TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: asdolph.jpg ZIPFILE: asdolph.zip RENDERER USED: POVRAY for Windows 3.1 TOOLS USED: RENDER TIME: Many, many hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium MMX 233, 64Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A fairly simple and obvious idea, I'm afraid. I didn't have the time or energy to come up with anything more exciting, let alone actually make it. Still, I'm fairly pleased with the result, although I could do with finding a somewhat less angular dolphin... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Back in the mists of time, I downloaded a free dolphin 3DS file for experimenting with, and there it sat for years. Anyway, I remembered I still had the file, and converted it to a Povray .INC file using a little utility called 3Dto3D (by Thomas Baier, '96). Humble old MS-DOS Edit stripped the unnecessary spaces out for me, losing many many KB off the filesize. A quick scale and rotate etc. got the dolphin into a reasonable size and orientation. Having got the idea of looking at the dolphin underwater, with a beam of light on it, the next thing was to create the water surface. This took a little while to get right, but is simple enough in the end. One important aspect was adding a "sky" - a blueish plane above the surface to make the water actually look vaguely like water. Then, all I did was to put the lightsource in, and make the media look alright. This took ages, as I am not an expert in such matters, and in the end I had to make the seafloor actually slope up to avoid an unrealistic horizon. As it is it doesn't look entirely convincing. Oh, and the bubbles. I needed something more in the picture, and these seemed reasonable. Just a very simple macro. And that's that. If I ever get a better dolphin model, I will probably redo the picture, but at low resolutions, it's not too bad. I used PSP to add the unobtrusive copyright message at the bottom right. Unfortunately, JPEG encoding scrambled it a little, but hey, it's still readable.