TITLE: Sandbags Away NAME: Neil Alexander COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: stoker@echo-on.net WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: balloon.jpg ZIPFILE: balloon.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.02 TOOLS USED: none RENDER TIME: approx. 12 hrs. HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 233 MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This scene shows a balloonist, swept low over the water by unstable conditions, firing his burner and dropping his sandbags in order to avoid splashing down; in effect, he is employing three of the elements to avoid the fourth. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For the background hills height field, I used POV-Ray to create a black-and-white image. I used a crackle color_map to make the rocks, and overlayed it with a clear-to-black bozo to make the hill shapes. I then used the same patterns and transformations with colors to make the image map for the hills, so that the rock and grass colors would exactly match the shapes. The water surface is also a height field from a POV-Ray image. The splashing water is a blob object comprised of several ramdomly sized paraboli with drops randomly placed along each arc. The other objects in the scene are typical CSG constructions, with a halo for the fire, and POV-Ray's atmosphere function to add a nice touch to the sky.