TITLE: Night Train
NAME: Glenn McCarter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: glenn@mccarters.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/gmccarter
TOPIC: Light and Fog
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: nitrain.jpg
ZIPFILE: nitrain.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.6

TOOLS USED: 

  POV-Ray editor (scene modeling, lighting, textures)
  Paint Shop Pro (image map, JPEG conversion, add signature)


RENDER TIME: 
    8h 42m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 2100+, overclocked


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It's a couple hours past midnight on a warm foggy evening, somewhere east of
Flagstaff.  The Zephyr waits at a siding, the deep hum of diesel engines idling
in the background.  Spence cannot sleep, too many things on his mind.  He steps
off to stretch his legs and light up a smoke.  He starts to relax.  But very
soon, Spencer's life is going to change forever...




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image evolved in an unusual way.  I normally do 3d modeling with a specific
image in mind.  But this time, a strange thing happened along the way.  The
original scene had a large water tower dominating the sky, casting a lot of
shadows.  But one time I accidentaly left the water tower unconnected to the
ground... and the image immediately took on a whole new meaning for me.  What
had been a quiet period-piece suddenly became a sci-fi alien encounter.

Otherwise, it's just lots of conventional POV-Ray Constructive Solid Geometry
modeling, done entirely within the POV-Ray text editor.  No external 3D meshes
or models were used.  Two image maps are used, to make a height field and part
of a texture.  I restricted myself to a very limited color range, to allow
light and shadow to do all the work.

I was especially careful in this image to arrange the shadows as selectively as
the objects themselves.  The scene has 6 real light sources (only one
interacting with the atmosphere) and a dozen pseudo-lights.  The scene is
filled with a media atmosphere, and uses a large dome-shaped sky sphere to
enable visible light rays even in skyward directions.  To smooth out the
shadows, the main light source is an area light consisting of a 3x3 array. 
These 9 lights are sampled 300 times along each ray to produce the soft light
beams in the foggy atmosphere.