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

TOOLS USED: 

    PaintShop Pro 5.1 (image map, jpeg conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    14h 23m 43s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Fishing boats struggle in the huge waves off Kanagawa, with Mount Fuji
visible in the background.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is based on Katsushika Hokusai's famous woodcut print "The Great
Wave Off Kanagawa". I wanted to reproduce some of the feeling of a
Japanese woodcut, and decided to use a complete separation of colour
and form. I like experimenting with different artistic styles and seeing
how I can emulate them in POV-Ray.

All the objects in this scene are pure white. The colour is produced
by coloured spotlights, shining on various parts of the scene. I was
aiming for a slight "spillage" of colour, to produce an effect somewhat
like an ink and watercolour wash painting. So the shadows and odd leakage
of colour between objects is intentional. I could have moved the sky
further back to avoid the shadows, but I like the effect - especially
the wave shadows, which sort of give the feeling of more waves in the
distance. The coloured spotlights are the only lights in the scene.
I fiddled with the brilliance parameter a bit to get the diffuse light
reflections from the spotlights, which are often placed at glancing angles.

The entire ocean, including the waves and foaming wavelets is one blob
object - containing 12,900 sphere components, all placed by hand (or at
least inside recursive macros and loops which were placed by hand). The
boats and crew are CSG, with their own spotlights for colour. Mount Fuji
is just a cone. The sky is a plane, in the relatively near background,
also lit by spotlights, as well as spillage light from the other objects.
All the objects are textured with suitable normals. The box with the
Japanese text is image-mapped from a scan of Hokusai's print.

If I had more time, I'd play with the lighting and the colours a bit
more - adding some more colour variety. I was hard pressed getting this
far, because with this many spotlights even small test renders were
taking a significant amount of time.

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