TITLE: Islands
NAME: Mick Hazelgrove
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: michael.hazelgrove@virgin.net
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: islands.jpg
ZIPFILE: islands.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Draw7 to convert the picture to jpg, Winblob a Blob Sculptor,
BezPatch byKlaus Lepschi and Lparser

RENDER TIME: 
    3hrs 45 mins with radiosity (approx)

HARDWARE USED: 
    300mhz Pentium 2 with 128mb ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Somewhere, some when on a hot watery planet maybe our own. Nature struggles to
find a foothold. Animals evolve to fill every ecological niche and prey on one
another to survive. I've tried to give a sense of a working ecology and of
nature tooth and claw. A winged dragonette snatches a crustacean that eats the
spores on the plants, a worm climbs a tree to eat the nuts and a sea creature
lurks under the leaves to catch a unwary dragonette. The many tentacled snail
waves its sticky arms around hoping to catch an unsuspecting crustacean. Nature

tooth and claw!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The sky was a by product of my attempts to recreated the galaxies in Chris
Colfax's galaxy include file and consists of 3 discs on top of one another.
The trees started as experiments with height fields and I would probably change
them now if I had the time as the roots which were the main reason for using
height fields can't be seen. I'd probably go for a mangrove swamp type of
root.
The leaves are sections of spheres rotated to create foliage the holes are
created by areas of high transmittance in the texture.
The dragonettes are csg constuctions. The wing panels are bezier patches.
The crustaceans were derived from a spider file that came with Lparser and which
was severely abused to create the basic body shape, the claw is PovRay and the
feelers were created in Lparser and added in PovRay.
The sea monster is a simple csg object.
The flowers are rotated bezier patches.
The plants are made from torii using an exponential function with some abuse in
the form of rotation added to get the trumpet shape. I had a lot of fun getting
random size, color and number to the sphores on the plant leaves, it was a lot
trickier than I first thought.
The shells were constructed from torii.
The worm was a snake in a previous incarnation and lost its head in this, to
become a worm. It may well end up a trade mark!