TITLE: Holland Unplugged NAME: Patrick Beisser COUNTRY: France EMAIL: beisser@pasteur.fr WEBPAGE: http://mapage.noos.fr/beisser/irtc_sea.html TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: unplug.jpg ZIPFILE: unplug.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray PPC version 3.1 TOOLS USED: GraphicConverter 3.9.1 to convert Targa to JPEG RENDER TIME: I forgot to check, but it was ready after my one-hour walk. HARDWARE USED: iMac 233 MHz G3 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Netherlands, in particular the two provincies North- and South-Holland, are famous for their 'polder' landscapes. These polders are basically stretches of artificial land below sea level. They are surrounded by dikes and kept dry by constantly pumping out water using windmills. The mills in the submitted image are modeled after the 18th-century windmills of Kinderdijk (South-Holland). When the IRTC team announced 'Sea' to be the stills topic, I immediately became intrigued by the macabre idea of a Dutch land- or rather seascape with its dikes unplugged. Hence 'Holland Unplugged'. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All done in POV-Ray 3.1, folks. I hereby enclose all POV documents used to generate the image. The basis of the scene is the 'hight_field' sea floor. The image for this height field was made with the POV-Ray file 'sbshape.pov', set to generate a 16-bit PNG file. The sea floor, actually being flooded grassland, is obscured by the water, but if you look carefully you might still discern a hint of dike under the windmills. Initially, I found it quite difficult to generate a transparent water surface. Since I was accustomed to the POV-Ray 3.0 syntax, it took some time to discover the new 'interior' description in the 3.1 version. This discription enabled me to generate a water layer from the intersection between a cube and a height field (image generated with 'wshape.pov') complete with index of refraction and attenuation of transparency. The windmills were made with solid primitives and assembled with CSG (see POV-Ray manual). Paris, July 15, 2000, Patrick Beisser