TITLE: Misty Morning NAME: Johannes Eriksson COUNTRY: Finland EMAIL: joheriks@abo.fi TOPIC: Light and fog COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: archipel.jpg ZIPFILE: archipel.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6 TOOLS USED: Rhinoceros 3.0, Poser 6, Photoshop Gilles Tran's makecloud RENDER TIME: 11h (14 node parallel render) HARDWARE USED: 14 x 2-3 GHz Intel and AMD PCs IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In this image I try to convey a calm, misty summer morning in a typical Finnish archipelago setting. The fisherman is heading out to retrieve the fishing nets which have been collecting perch during the night. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I had a clear vision of this image from the beginning since I saw the topic for the competition: a sunrise with clouds in the sky; calm sea; silhouetted islands, rocks and a lone boat, all viewed through a wide angle lens. The boat and oars were modelled in Rhino 3D using a couple of simple sweeps, and the oarsman is the standard Poser male + cowboy hat prop. I exported the Poser model to .obj and imported it into Rhino, and then exported the complete mesh to the povray format. The clouds are spheres filled with scattering media defined by df3 density maps. The density maps were generated with Gilles Tran's excellent makecloud: http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources13.htm The mist above the sea surface is created using a combination of a makecloud density file and some procedural media. The rocks, stones and pebbles scattered around the scene are different spheres, blobs and procedural isosurfaces. They are randomly placed around certain points in the scene. The terns sitting on the rocks were modelled in Rhino (basically they are just flat profiles). The reeds were generated with a simple tree generator I wrote. The sky is simply a sky_sphere with a bell-curve like gradient going from yellow via blue to black. The sun is a white sphere surrounded by a disc with a cylindrical color map fading out to transparent to create a soft halo/flare effect. There is one point light for all objects except the clouds which have their own light source. All in all I spent a quite a lot of time tweaking the colors of the sky and the light source color since they control very much the mood of the image. A combination of mathematical functions (f_ridged_mf, f_waves, and a simple doppler frequency shift) was used as the normal map for the water surface. There are also three image maps based on photos I've taken in this image: the background forest and the two far islands. They were placed on discs and planes which are rotated to face the camera. To avoid aliasing problems around the reeds, which are composed of very thing cylinders and cones, I rendered the scene at 2160x1200 and resmpled it down to the final size in Photoshop. I also used PS to add the signature and for conversion to JPG. If you have any questions or want to know more details, do not hesitate to contact me by email. You can also download the source of this scene; to render it requires downloading makecloud and tga2df3. However, please note that rendering this scene at full resolution with radiosity takes an excruciatingly long time, due to heavy and probably inefficient use of media--I used a 14 PCs at 2-3 GHz each in parallel for the final version.