TITLE: Dawn in the Forest
NAME: Scott Middleton
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: scooby@pld.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: smdawn.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02 (Windows)

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Moray (evaluation ver.), and HF-Lab

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hours 11 minutes 17.0 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 120 w/ 48 Meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Although I truly love designing woodland scenes, I also find them incredibly
difficult to get just right.  I usually get tired before I get satisfied, and
this scene is no exception.

I call this simply: "Dawn in the Forest"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The foreground tree trunk, the mushrooms, and the buttterfly were all modelled
in sPatch (this is only my second trace using this FANTASTIC program).  The
grass is simply several (a whole bunch!) of height fields scaled down, with an
underlying soil-textured plane.  These were created using John Beale's HF-Lab. 
The lavender flowers in the back were also modelled in sPatch; I could have
used simpler shapes but I already had them on hand from another trace.

All of the textures were created in the Moray texture editor, except for the
tree trunks.  These are textured with a public domain image map downloaded from
some forgotten website.

Lighting was accomplished with a single area light, shining through several
'shadow map' objects.  These objects are simply discs with a partially
transparent texture applied.  This was an attempt to create forest-like shadows
from an imaginary canopy overhead.  Additional lighting is supplied by
low-power spotlights on the mushrooms and butterfly.

With all of the patch objects and height fields, the scene contains 3431 frame
level objects.