TITLE: Living in the Desert
NAME: Charles E V Pegge
COUNTRY: Wales
EMAIL: cevp@evemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.cevp.freewire.co.ukJPEGFILE: indesert.jpg

TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: indesert.jpg
ZIPFILE: indesert.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 

 'Poser 5' for figures.
 'Yuna Hair'           from Maya http://digitalcrafts.e.fiw-web.net/
 'Poseray'             to translate obj files into pov files.
 'Tomtree'             to generate palm trees.
 'Explore Geodesics 1' prototype software to generate domes.
 'Easy Thumbnails'     to convert image to jpeg


RENDER TIME: 
    about 18 minutes.

HARDWARE USED: 
    PC with Athlon 3200XP with 1Gig system memory



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the desert. Vast, hot, dry, dusty but not desolate.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


My aim is to produce a scene which looks as natural as possible but since I live
in a wet temperate 
climate, the nearest habitat similar to a desert is the beaches and rocky shores
near my home. So I 
dont know whether you ever find palm trees in the same place as cacti. For this
and other factual
errors I plead artistic license.  

This scene makes extensive use of Pov Ray's Isosurface geometry and randomising
seed variables. 
In creating a landscape most of the effort went into scrambling unwanted
symmetries and repetition.

The domes, inspired by Buckminster Fuller,  were generated from my own prototype
software 'Explore 
Geodesics' which produces DXF and Pov output and you might say is at the alpha
stage. Though not 
strictly geodesic, these domes are designed to use the smallest possible number
of different 
types of panel and most evenly spread node angles, making construction a
practical possibility. 
For the nearest dome, there are only three panel shapes and two window shapes.

I have shamelessly made use of PovRay's superb isocacti and some of Tom Aust's
trees in TomTree as well 
as Poser figures and hair from Studio Maya.

The clouds are multiple layers of turbulent bump texture with varying number of
turbulence octaves.
In daylight conditions the light source is positioned between the cloud layers
and the 
ground. Using a light source color values of greater than one seems to enhance
the clouds.

The image was rendered at 1280x1024 pixels with antialiasing.
I had to use 73% quality jpeg compression to keep the file size within 250k.
'Easy Thumbnails' made
jpeg fine tuning very easy.

Only the poser figures and the B Fuller figure used image maps. 




Source material

Excluding the Poser figures and TomTree I include my entire suite of POV code
for this type of scene and 
also some dome generating software which you are welcome to try at your own
risk. 

When unzipping, please maintain the folder structure. When you create a dome
with 'Explore Geodesics'
it will generate a file called 'geo.inc' in the 'Ray' folder. Use 'space.pov' to
view the sphere. Use 
'landscape.pov' to view as a dome in the scene. For the landscape you will need
to rename the old 
geo1.inc to something else then rename your new geo,inc to geo1.inc. Textures
are scripted in the 
settings file.


The domes are specified by a heuristic formula of which you will find some
examples in the dropdown
selector box. The formula of the nearest dome in the desert scene is 'ii1kio4g'
which means the basic 
shape is an icosahedron, each triangle is subdivided once into 4 sub triangles
then each of these is 
split into 3 kite shapes with 40% of the tail section removed to provide the
openings which are glazed
to form windows. The more distant dome is 'ii1fd' 

I have not tested this software to extreme complexity but it seems to be stable.
The 
geometry of the higher frequency diamonds is inaccurate in that the diamonds may
be slightly 
bent when they should be completely flat. You will also find that for reasons
unknown, sometimes nodes 
will be missed out. If this happens, just press 'GO' again and the problem
should resolve itself.