TITLE: rr_snowplane.jpg NAME: Roman Reiner COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: limdaepl@gmx.de TOPIC: Out Of Place COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: rr_snowp.jpg ZIPFILE: rr_snowp.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.6 TOOLS USED: none RENDER TIME: Parse Time: 2 minutes 50 seconds (170 seconds) Render Time: 15 minutes 20 seconds (920 seconds) Total Time: 18 minutes 10 seconds (1090 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Celeron 2.6 GHz, 640 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A cactus standing in a frosty ice and snow-covered landscape. When thinking of the topic my first intention was not to make it too unrealistic or even surrealistic. That has to do with the fact that I do not like surrealismus very much and that I do not consider it as very creative since the objects in an surrealistic image are usually out of their usual place in some kind. Of course one could say my image is unrealistic as well but one will see what climatic changes will bring ;-) The funny thing of my interpretation is that you can wonder both how the cactus came into that frosty region and how the snow and ice came into an region where there grow cactuses. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I started with the cactus. The body is a merge of the simple primitives sphere, cylinder and torus, represented through isosurface-functions. The grooves are cut into the surface by subtracting a gradient pigment-function warped spherically or torodially respectively around the primitives. The thorns are cone-objects placed by using trace. The blades of grass are simple CSG-Objects. Use a few hundred of them and you get a nice bundle of grass growing around the cactus. After that I started with the landscape. I formerly used two height fields. One almost plane one in the foreground and a second one in the background which should form some mountains. What you can see now is the result of placing some scaling, rotating and translating statements for the second height field in the wrong order. I would like to apologize for the fact that I had made such a nice shape just by accident and I'm sure I couldn't have done it "by hand". I have no idea how the cracks in the front came in there for instance. But it has also caused a lot of problems when trying to place the falling snow which I'll mention in the next paragraph. Later I recognized that the first height field isn't visible anymore and I took it out. The snowflakes consist partly of some tiny media-containing spheres and mainly of a bozo- pattered semitransparent sphere around the camera. Second solution isn't very nice and my intention was it to use only the first one but there occured several problems. Firstly I couldn't prevent the spheres from causing artifacts where they overlapped and secondly the distances in the image do not behave as it might look. The top of the mountain in the back for instance is approximately four times nearer than its foot and almost at the same distance as the cactus. So you can guess that it is very difficult to archive useable results. As the contrast between the cactus and the landscape was too big I added some icicles and a frosty texture.