TITLE: Road NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: road.jpg ZIPFILE: road.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor Paint Shop Pro 5 MakeTree by Gilles Tran (www.oylnale.com) Crossroads 3D by Keith Rule (http://home.europa.com/~keithr/crossroads) WorldMachine 0.98 beta by Stephen Schmitt (http://students.washington.edu/sschmitt/world/) RENDER TIME: 13 hours 5 minutes HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The driver rounds a corner to see the long road still ahead of him... The image was rendered at 2560x1024, but I felt that was a bit excessive for casual IRTC viewers so I resized it to 1280x512. If you want to see the full version it's on my website: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com/images/road_big.jpg DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The landscape was created in world machine. The basic shape is a hybrid multi-fractal with some tweaking to make it fit my mental image, then on top of that I've added erosion. The clever bit is the road, which was also created in worldmachine. I used a smooth noise function for the basic direction, then I modified the lanscape to add zig-zags on the areas of steep slope. The road's width is achieved by height selecting a hard edge for the centre of the road, then applying a smooth to it, so that the road's width is constant along it's length. The road is then applied to the terrain so that it is raised and smoothed from the underlying terrain shape. I've included the world machine source in the zip file. The landscape texture uses some macros I've created to roughly imitate the superb texturing techniques used in Terragen. They allow textures to be built up in layers, where each layer can be a complex texture in itself, with rules on how noisey the blend between this and the underlying texture should be. Each layer can be set to have a max & min slope, and a max and min height, with ranges on both these values. The landscape uses 4 layers to do: Rock, Soil, Grass, and Snow. The snow has some interesting diffuse properties to make it catch the light nicely. If I get time I'll refine the macros to reproduce all the features of terragen's textures and distribute them on my website. The road texture uses a seperate image exported from world machine (derived from the same source as that used to raise and smooth the road in the heightfield). This is used to blend between a tarmac texture (black with specular and a granite normal), some gravel at the road edge, and the white line down the middle. The white line is dashed using a simple gradient, which means if you could see the lines where the road bends in the distance, you'd see the dashes become much longer! The sky consists of a sky_sphere, with a simple gradient and a glow for the sun, and a cloud sphere. The cloud sphere has a 3 layer transparent texture on it based on a wrinkle pigment. I played with a few different settings to get the right effect, but I still had to cheat and force it to not cast shadows on the land. The fog is standard pov fog. I didn't want to use media since it might bump up the render times severely. There's some very subtle turbulence on the fog, it's hardly noticeable now but without it the scene seemed rather flat. The car is a model downloaded from 3D cafe and converted to pov using crossroads, then textured by hand in pov & painst shop pro. It's a Lancia Beta HPE, apparently, though a friend of mine who's a car fanatic says it doesn't look quite like one! In any case it serves the purpose. The car has a racing livery on it, to imply it's maybe taking part in some kind of rally, though at the size it appears in the image this isn't obvious. I leave the purpose of the drive open to interpretation. The trees are made with maketree. They're variations on one of the standard trees that comes with maketree, but with a slight tweak to the textures to make them work with my lighting setup. There's only actually 2 different variations which are instanced 80 times throughout the scene, though even on the high res image I can only see 8 of them!