TITLE: A Flood NAME: Marjorie Diez de Graterol/MDiez COUNTRY: Venezuela EMAIL: emediez@emediez.com WEBPAGE: http www.emediez.com TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: a_fld_mg.jpg ZIPFILE: a_fld_mg.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay v. 3.02 TOOLS USED: POVRay 3.02, Paint Shop Pro 5.0 to make gif images and to add a layer with the name and title, Corel Photo Paint to convert to jpg format, 10% compression and 0 smoothing, and Rhino3d to model the buildings and the mailbox. The TextureViewer was used to compare textures and colors. RENDER TIME: 1 hour 34 m 52 s HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 MHz, 48 RAM 4.0 GB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The scene is a flooded place. Obviuosly, it is flooded by water. Maybe it is because I live in Texas, and unfortunately for many people, it has been the daily story recently. There is only one type of building -repeated and trimmed at the back-. I have included a mailbox, which usually is a kind of measurement about how high the rising waters will get., and a brick fence, to enhance the waters This scene is *not* a photo-realistic one. My stairs are on the air, floating. I pretend my scene to be surrealistic, not hyper-realistic. This long explanation/description of the image is a product from very encouraging comments I received on my last image. Although I do not agree too much with them regarding the need of talking about something one is looking at -this comes from my visual arts training-, I can understand the purpose. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 1) The first step was creating the sky_sphere. I wanted to have a sky with october-november look- and trying to get other colors than those in colors.inc, took me through a lot of new steps. Scanning textures from ads -Grocery stores are superb-, then extracting the rgb color factor in PSP/255), then traslating into the values that POV uses -with Excel, of course. So I came up with some colors to work with and ended up with a very useful homemade color converter. Some of them are in the inc. files. 2)The plane was consuming because of the trial-and-error- period, but I feel happy with the results. The feeling of some type of soil and curbs underneath is given by a height_field, done with a gif image -PSP-. Sharpening this gif image gave those areas the altitude I wanted. The process of traslating this gif image below water so that it could be seen was hard. 3) The building, -because it is only one- was modeled in Rhino3D and exported as meshes to POV. Taking advantage of the fact that it was mainly conformed by straight lines, the number of polygons was reduced to minimum, providing a faster rendering. Regarding the stairs, which are aligned in the air, I want to say that I am aware of that, and furthermore, I wanted them in that way. It has to do with the trend of photorrealism which seems to be a kind of goal lately. I like surrealism more, so that's the reason. The textures in the exterior wall is made with a gif image made in PSP, using the airbrush feature. Then, I created the texture in POV, using a texture map. 4) The objects at the left back in the scene are buildings duplicated, without a pair of walls. I kept the textures. 5) The object at the far end of the scene is a height_field made with another gif image, in PSP. It is included in source zip file. It is a gif map filtered -to have different heights- and colorized in violet, just to set it far away. 6) The mailbox was also modeled in Rhino3d and exported to POV and texturized right there. 7) Lights are key. There are a lot of lights, and two spotlights. This is the first time I work with fog, and it proved to be useful enhancing some points I wanted to be highlighted.