TITLE: Soaring
NAME: Michael Wareman
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: MWAREMAN@ADMIN.OLDSCOLLEGE.AB.CA
WEBPAGE: Do not have one
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: soaring.jpg
ZIPFILE: soaring.zip
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for DOS
TOOLS USED: Fractint 19.2, Midnight Modeller 2.0a, Lparser 4.0, Neopaint,       
     Paintshop Pro, Universe 1.0, Wcvt2pov.exe

RENDER TIME: 1 hour 20 minutes
HARDWARE USED: 486 100Mhz, 16 Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I thought of doing something showing animals flying.  Thus, soaring
birds/reptiles came into being.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This time around I found that doing this image was much like writting an essay:
it develops as I work on it.  At first I didn't know exactly what I wanted to
do.  Something with flying birds.  I used Midnight Modeller 2.0 to create the
preached and soaring birds/reptiles you see in the image.  Once that was done I
wanted them to soar over an alien landscape with one large, prominent rock
where one of the birds would be looking like he just landed or is just ready to
take off.  The small land form is plasma fractal created using Fractint.  The
larger land I created using Neopaint & Paintshop Pro.  I am not totally happy
with how it turned out but after many, many hours of trying I had to settle for
what I did manage to create.  After many trial runs I had the two land forms
scaled and translated the way I thought looked best.  Then I thought for effect
I would add water.  This at first turned out to be more difficult than I
thought.  Due to the angle of the camera, and some sort of need to have a
horizon, using a plane just didn't work.  Then I remembered something about
using a sphere to model an earth moon effect.  So I created a large sphere and
adjusted its size and placement so that I had water showing in the foreground
but still had a horizon.  A second height_field was used to create the clouds
that are seen in the distance.  This too, took some trial an error to get so
that the clouds where off in the background and didn't obscure the landscape
below too much.

While surfacing the Internet I found a shareware program for creating beautiful
interstellar scenes.  Only problem is that I needed a Windows 95 machine, that
took some doing but as you can see I managed.  Along with the nebula I wanted a
moon in my scene.  This also caused some problems.  Mainly, it cast a shadow on
my background.  This was solved bu moving the background far enough back so
that the shadow is actually below the horizon.  The texture for the moon is a
modified wood texture.  I had thought about giving the moon rings but maybe
later.  I find that after 3 or 4 weeks of working on an image I want to try
something else.  I also thought that the rings might detract from the true
importance components of the image.

I liked the dolphin in the picture.  I was to show another form of flight.  The
dolphin was orignally part of a set of three.  I used WCVT2POV to convert the
dolphins from DXF format to RAW.  Then I used Midnight Modeller to extract the
three dolphins into separate parts.  Placing and sizing the dolphin took some
trial and error, as did most things in this work!

The trees were created using Lparser.  I modified one of the tree forms so that
Lparser would create a branching form with no leaves.  Having the output as
blobs added a surrealistic effect to the trees.  Again, what I wanted and what
I got are two different things.  I wanted a more gnarled, sinister looking
trees.  But, again after much trial and error I did not managed to get that.

I had a spaceship in the picture but decided to leave it out as it didn't seem
to fit with what else was happening with the image.

I have included all the files I used to create the image in the SOARING.ZIP
file.  If anyone has any ideas on how to acheive some of the effects that I was
after, or just plain want to discuss the image further please email me.

CyberMike