TITLE: Once there was a city...
NAME: Luis Valoyes
COUNTRY: Colombia
EMAIL: luisvaloyes@malditasea.zzn.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.luisvaloyes.cn.st
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: once.jpg
ZIPFILE: once.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    -Blob Sculptor
                       -Calimax Modeller
                       -Spilin Editor
                       -POV-Ray
                       -Crossroads
                       -EditPad
                       -Pbrush
                       -Corel Photo House

RENDER TIME: 
    45 min 34 sec ( 23' 31" for parsing and 22' 03" for tracing )

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6, 32 Mb RAM, running Windows 98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Atlantida, an ancient city lost under the sea for centuries according to the
legend, one of the biggest misteries related to the sea,  and a huge source of
ideas for this topic. As soon as I knew that the topic was Sea, I decided to
make something about Atlantida, and I finally decided to show the image of the
city after 2000 or 3000 years under the sea, at least the way I imagine it must
be, and I got the image of a dead city, where nature has slowly started to take
control over all, and where it's obvious that anything that the man can do
means nothing, because nature is always stronger...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

1. MODELING: The architectural objects were modeled entirely using primitives
and CSG, using first Calimax Modeller and then the POV-Ray editor. The seaweed
was made this way too. The objects which are a little more "organic", like the
fish, the sculptures and the corals were made using Blob Sculptor, the corals
were directly exported as POV Blobs, but the other objects were saved as .raw
files, and converted using Crossroads, this way the files are 100 times bigger
but the objects just look better. The pottery objects were made with Spilin
Editor and directly exported as POV objects. The terrain is made with three
rotated planes.
2. TEXTURES: This scene only contains procedural textures. I played with POV for
a couple of weeks trying to see what could I do with pigments and normals, and
so I got all the textures that I needed for this image. I specially like the
texture that I used for the seaweeds, although it looks better without fog.
3. SCENE: The final scene was entirely assembled using POV-Ray. All the required
.inc files were organized with EditPad and then started the long process to put
all the things together, because sometimes I got a little confused because of
the scaling of some objects and sometimes I just could not place the objects
where I wanted them to be. Really, the only object thas is located right where
it should be is the sea star. Finally I used a green-blue fog to create the sea
environment.
4. IMAGE: The final image was rendered with POV-Ray as an 800x600 bitmap, I
really expected that the rendering time was longer, but fortunately it was not,
and I used Pbrush (yes, the one that comes with Windows) to add the credits and
Corel Photo House to save it as a .jpg file. Unfortunately the jpg conversion
added some noise around the fishes and the seaweeds, even with the best
quality.

Notes: 
1. Thanks for all the comments about my two entries for the previous round, both
images were between the last 10 in that round, but the comments have been very
useful, I'm in this competition to learn and all your comments will really help
me.
2. I wanted to make a more detailed description of both the image and the
creation process, but my english is not that good, sorry.
3. The source files for this scene take about 10 Mb, so the "once.zip" file
contains only a link to a web site where you can download a group of .zip files
with all the required .pov and .inc files and a PNG version of the image
(without the noise).