TITLE: After the rain NAME: Nicolas "N'x" Calimet COUNTRY: France EMAIL: nx@chez.com WEBPAGE: http://www.chez.com/nx (under construction) TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: afterain.jpg ZIPFILE: afterain.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 (UNIX) TOOLS USED: GForge (height-field), Photoshop (text, JPEG conversion) RENDER TIME: 4 days 13 hours 35 min. (using -UL switch) HARDWARE USED: Digital Alpha 440 Mhz, 2 Gb RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Water is known to be the most important element on Earth, because it is both almost everywhere and necessary for life (how lucky we are). I decided to show a landscape when I realized that it was the simpliest and realistic way to depict that multimorphous element. I tried to combine several representations of water: lake, droplets (on the bushs, yet not really visible), clouds, and a wet atmosphere (but no ice, sigh). Hence, the kind of weather you get when the rain is over. This is actually a landscape in France I know for quite a long time: the Serre-Pon_on's artificial lake. The lonely chapel is a relic of the old village that was submerged when came the waters, 40 years ago. It makes me feel how small we are beside the nature, even if sometimes we've got the power to change -- or to destroy it. My first "real" picture with Povray. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well, nothing really complicated. I actually tried to focus on the photo-realism that allows ray-tracing. Say, I spent quite a long time to do the fine-tuning for everything (as everybody, I know). * Brain and text editor for conception, but nothing's clever :_( * Sun is a simple light, but super-sampled atmosphere does all the job. I choose the type 2 atmosphere to better control the background visibility. Really long to render... * Clouds are just a scaled sphere with bozo pigment. * Moutains and the hill for the chapel are copies of a single height- field created with GForge. Since the view is against the light, it uses a simple texture (bozo again). Not visible at all, but I feel more comfortable using it ;) * Chapel is a CSG combination of basic shapes. Seems to be the less realistic object, even when adding noise and stuffs like that in texture. Details are increased in that way (thick door and window). I couldn't spend too much time for that object. Aouch. * Tree and bushs are the **fast** include files from Neil Alexander (May-June Winner). I changed a few stuffs inside, like branch length. Reflection and a single water droplet are added to each leaf in bushs. I planed to use my own tree include file, but it's still in developpment. * Light reflections on the lake are a 5*20 array of spotlights turned toward the camera, with "random noise" in their positions. Designed to create that dazzling light around the chapel. Beware: it requires lots of memory (around 250 Mbytes) if you don't turn off light buffers (-UL). Maybe should be replaced with flares, e.g. NKFlare sparkles, or halo to speed up rendering. * Focal blur (hi-sampled too) for the foreground. Tiiiiime consuming. * ... * Ah, forgot, I added fog to highlight the scene, particulary on the right part. No brightness/contrast or gamma correction is applied. Hope that's some picture :) N'x