TITLE: Atlantic Still Life
NAME: Ian Shumsky
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: ianshumsky@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.outerarm.demon.co.uk/graphics/graphics.html
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: asl.jpg
ZIPFILE: asl.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    Nathan Kopp's POV MegaPatch 0.5a


TOOLS USED: 

    Paint Shop Pro 5
    Warp's Mesh Smoother
    Keith Rule's Crossroads


RENDER TIME: 

    Time for Parse:     0 hours  0 minutes 29 seconds (29 seconds)
    Time for Photons:   0 hours  1 minutes 19 seconds (79 seconds)
    Time for Trace:   193 hours 37 minutes 49 seconds (697069 seconds)
    Total Time:       193 hours 39 minutes 37 seconds (697177 seconds)

This is about 8 days... After I completed the render I added
a bounded_by statement to the globe holder and render times
were reduced by a factor of 10. However, this was a little
late for the competition...


HARDWARE USED: 

    PII 300MHz, 64 Meg, 1 Gig swap, running Win95


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I was a little stuck when the topic was announced. It
sounded similar to the 'water' round but a little more
constrained. I suspected that there would be several images
depicting the open sea and I wanted to do something a little
different. After a little while, I thought about displaying
the sea on a map, and this in turn led to a globe. The globe
has been rotated to show the Atlantic Ocean.

I was going to leave the image with just the globe, but the
more I looked at it, the less appropriate to the topic the
image felt. I decided to add some fossils and shells to the
image to add more nautical flavours to the image, but only
managed to add the fossils. As it stands, I consider the
image to be work in progress.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The Globe: This is the centre point for the image. It is
constructed by using Giles Tran's code, which wraps a height
field around a sphere using isosurfaces. The rest of the
object is simple CSG operations. MegaPov's min_extent and
max_extent functions are used to centre the degree numbers
before the CSG operation.

Fossil Rocks: The trilobite fossils are a mesh objects. They
started life as a VRML object found at the Natural History
museum website
(http://www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tempexhib/VRML/offline.html)
and are laser scans of real fossils. I converted the VRML to
POV using Crossroads, then used Warp's mesh smoother to
smooth the mesh. I also found a nice image of a Trilobite
fossil somewhere on the web and used this as a basis for an
image map for the mesh. The rocks the fossils are placed in
is a POV generated height fields. The heighfields were
squared in PSP and a black 1 pixel border was added to close
of the edges of the height field. The stands are a simple
CSG objects with a glass material.

The Desk: This is a CSG object with a height-field as the
actual desk. This allowed slight imperfections and dents to
be etched into the surface of the desk, though you can't
really tell. I think a y-gradient texture map with a
different finish would have brought out the height field
better.

Lights: there are 3 lights in the scene. There are two
illuminating side fill lights and an overhead lamp. This is
apparently a 'classic' lighting set-up for TV and portrait
(see http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~candace/default.html).

Studio: All the objects are placed in a 'studio'. This is
basically a textured inversed box that is used to assist in
the radiosity.

The zip file contains most items to create the image. It
doesn't include the Trilobite meshes, the globe land height
field or the fossil labels.