TITLE: Shark Cam
NAME: Lance Hetlet
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: hetletll@alaska.net
WEBPAGE: www.alaska.net/~hetletll
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sharkcam.jpg
ZIPFILE: sharkcam.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows 3.00e

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 2.5

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour, 7 minutes, 47 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    133Mhz Pentium w/32MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A standard shark cage with a daring nature photographer using
a motion
picture camera to capture the grace and beauty of several sharks.  Much of what
you'd see
on the Discovery Channel


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    Since sharks are an interest of mine,

I've wanted to do something with sharks for some time.  My first attempt at
creating a
shark was by inputting the points of the bezier patches manually, that was
taking too
long and not yielding good results.  I then tried intersecting 3 height fields. 
One of
the top view, one of the front view and one of the side view.  These second
attempts were
good, but left shark edges on them that don't exist in real life.  They just
were not
smooth all over.  Testing different Modelers, I turned to Moray.  I used an
unregistered
version for this project and love the results that it produced that registration
is next.

Once the main shark was made, I could clone it, but on two of them I had to go
back and
turn the tails some.  I did not want all of the sharks to be straight and stiff,
they do
move a bit.

I thought having the door to the cage open with the diver coming out may be on
the unrealistic
side of things, but then again, they're only pixels.  Having a camera in front
of the divers
face solved the problem of getting him to look realstic in that area.

I thought it would be nice to add some other fish in there as well.  I wasn't
able to add
as many details as I would've liked due to a lack of time.  If you notice, each
fish has the
same pattern.  A detail I'll have to fix another day.

I added some ground fog to give it that thick murky water feel, but
unfortunately, since it's
ground fog, it gave the desired affect for the bottom half, but the top half is
very clear.