TITLE: Life Above the Desert
NAME: Skip Talbot
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: skipt1@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.skip.cc
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lifeabov.jpg
ZIPFILE: lifeabov.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhinoceros 2.0

RENDER TIME: 
    Approximately 3 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium IV 1.8 GHz 512 MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The barren wind swept dunes are completely devoid of both water and life.  Yet
the sky above is a bustling city of airships, floating far from the scorching,
shifting sands.  Hydrogen, mined by a floating station tethered to the surface,
is the life giving center of the complex.  It is used in everything from power,
with its fusion byproduct, helium, used to keep the ships safely afloat, to
propulsion, to water production.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Work started with the sand dunes.  The dunes are an isosurface utilizing the
f_ridged_mf function and the bumps pattern to give the peaks a varying height. 
Throw a little extra crand into the texture, compensating for the focal blur,
and you have got some decent sand.

Focus then shifted on the lighting and atmosphere.  I decided not to complicate
things, since I wanted a simple clear desert sky, and went with a layered
sky_sphere.  The sun is a point light aligned with a gradient texture in the
sky_sphere to provide a bit more natural lighting for the radiosity.  I kept
the scene simple with a ground fog for the atmospheric shading instead of
media.  Radiosity is recursion limit 2 and 1.5 brightness.

The camera was set low to the dunes with a rather unrealistic focal blur. 
Objects set out a few hundred feet are still blurry, yet this adds to the
artistic accent.  This scene is a sci-fi surrealism so I was not hell bent on
realism like I usually am.  The camera is also super wide angle with an aspect
ratio providing a panoramic view.

All airships were modeled in Rhinoceros.  Some of them are reminiscent to
conventional airships and dirigibles, and some are wild, new designs.  The
larger unique ships were hand placed and the small blimps were distributed
along splines and random clusters via a few loops.  I went heavy on the
variable reflection for the textures, and used random seeds to texture the
small blimps.

A high quality PNG and the POV source are included in the ZIP file.  I left the
40 MB of mesh out to save space.