TITLE: The fountain and the fairytree
NAME: Daniel Hofmann
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: dan-h@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: thunderspace.org
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: m_fairyt.jpg
ZIPFILE: m_fairyt.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PoV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    AutoCad2000, CADPov, Poser3, PoseRay, SPatch

RENDER TIME: 
    5 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII 350 MHz, 128 MB RAM + PIII 850 MHz, 256 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    somewhere at the end of the day, there is an endless running
fountain, opposite to the last outpost of the fairy empire, the fairy tree
tower, where guardias watch the river...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Fountain, boat and fairytree were created in AutoCad using primitives,
rotation-objects and boolean geometrie (CSGs) - some structures were set as
POV-Spheres, using CADPov and in Pov-Ray converted into splined, multipart
Blobs (using a spline formula i "invented" in the middle 90ies for a music
renderer in PowerBasic). 
Although i could have used PoV-CSGs too, there is no good way to do them with
ACad+CADPoV in WYSIWYG and i love ACad, i also got the experience the created
meshes render faster than "real" CSGs
Maybe this is not enough architecture in your eyes, decide yourself...
(Guess what my profession is... ... it's building services and environmental
engineering ;-)
The Trees use that splined multipart Blobs too for the whole trunk, branches,
roots - a little bit tricky, but i found out that blobs render faster than
sphere-cone combinations using more than 50 stages.
Leaves i first wanted to do with transmaps at twice folded simple meshes, but
PoV has some disadvantages in using atmosphere (media) there, one can see the
invisible parts. 
So i did a painfull change to heightfields (with cut down waterlevel) which
suits my needs so far, the only disadvantage is the stiff looking of the
leaves.
Gras is done by a "simple" isosurface, the larger ones are procedural
spline-patches.
The fairy is done in poser and converted with PoseRay, her cloth and the monk in
the boat are done with sPatch.
Rendering was done in 1152x864 with true Media-sky, one lightsource (sun) and
radiosity, without antialiasing.
Some Idea for the lucky ones, having 2 computers: i used a negativ sky camera
vector at the second and setup to the whole image at both computers, so that
it's ready when they meet, equal where they meet. The only disadvantage is the
waste time of one radiosity pretrace (in my case 3 hours)

You may use my sources of course (cause i want to spread the word - it's PoV),
but please let me know, if you have some good ideas for improving some things.
I'm still trying to improve my skills... (The sources of the sources are
available too, please let me know)

PS: the m_ is there for Modjo, i found some really exciting Modjo-World-Pix out
there, and my long time aim is to do it better with PoV - a long way to go...

AND: I'm still searching for a poor fool rendering this to 4000x3000, any
volonteers?