TITLE: Serpentine
NAME: Steve Shelby
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: sshelby@shelbyvision.com
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: srpntine.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Corel PhotoPaint8, POVray

RENDER TIME: 
    About 2 hours (forgot to record it)

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 2gh 256mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A scene of almost total lifelessness, dominated by serpentine
sand dunes. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The scene was created with Moray. I
decided early on that I would not try to make it photo-realistic, but rather
somewhat stylized or impressionistic. I studied many pictures of sand dunes to
get an understanding of what they look like. The dunes in my scene are mesh
objects. I first tried heightfields and could not get it to work right.    
The sand ripples are a bump map made from an image created by line drawing a
pattern in PhotoPaint and then using gaussian blur to achieve the desired
effect. I had to make a drawing of a large enough area that no repitition
pattern could be observed in the final image. The ripples took a lot of
experimentation, and consumed almost half the time spent on the total project.
The mountains in the background are a heightfield, textured with a brick pattern
with turbulance. The haze is both media and fog.
The snake is one I made last year in an animation project. I had to use
radiosity in order to make the snake visable in the shadows.