EMAIL: desert-irtc@usa.net NAME: Matthew J. Sayre TOPIC: Forces of Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Water over Time COUNTRY: USA RENDERER USED: Terragen v0.9.19 TOOLS USED: MS Paint (to transfer .BMP to .JPG), Photoshop Essentials (branding), SOPack plugin. RENDER TIME: 4h 13m 45s HARDWARE USED: Panasonic Toughbook CF-51, Intel Centrino IMAGE DESCRIPTION: And the Watcher returned to one of his favorite planets. This blue-green planet orbiting third from a small yellow sun. He had returned to one of his favorite places on this planet, what used to be a gigantic peaceful green field with a stream flowing through the middle. Now there was this immense gorge here. Had it been so long since his last visit? Had there been enough time for the stream to cut into the earth and form this... wound in one of his sanctuaries? No... not a wound. Just change. A lot of change. It was true, this last trip out into The Great Darkness between the stars, he traveled further than he had before and had seen many new things. And he had come back and seen this new thing. He realized this would be first change of many. He marvelled at how a simple substance as water could carve great monuments, given enough time. He had seen storms that decimated the population centers of this planet, both large and small. He had seen earthquakes that shattered their dwellings and tore asunder the landscape. But the inhabitants here rebuilt and repaired when it was over and life went on. All in an infintesimal fraction of the time to blink an eye in comparison to the time he had last been here. And the all while, water flowed and carved this new creation out of the land. Just simple, flowing water. He mourned his loss and rejoiced his gain, this new sanctuary which he had been given. He stayed and studied this new place. Eventually, he departed, vowing not to take so much time before he returned. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used Terrgen to create this picture. Creating the height field was easy enough, but the devil was in the details. I just used the internal generator randomly and kept moving the camera around until I found something I liked. So I created an image similar to the final picture, but it was just too boring. It was then that I explored the world of Terragen Plugins. I found a link to the SOPack homepage from Planetterragen.com, which I used for the strata on the walls. It took me a while to find a strata design and height variation scheme I was happy with. The clouds weren't too difficult. I tried many variations, sizes, etc, until I decided on what is now in the picture. Placement of the sun was another big issue. It always seemed like either there was too much light or too much shadow. I think I did a pretty good job of balancing the light and dark. I was tinkering forever with the water and the greenery. With the water, I initally used the default values for "deep" water, which is a blue shade found similar to a lake. It just didn't look right. I tried a turquiose/greener more natural looking color, but I couldn't get it to work. So I changed it to what you see now. It was pretty much the same way with the greenery. I just couldn't get the differing shades of green to balance right. I kept the deeper green down towards the water and the lighter green up on top of the rocks. All in all. I'm pretty happy with the picture, I think it needs to be tweaked more, but I can keep doing that forever and never be happy with it...