TITLE: to sing with the whale NAME: Marc Schimmler COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: schimmler@ica.uni-stuttgart.de WEBPAGE: --- TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: humpback.jpg ZIPFILE: humpback.zip RENDERER USED: x-povray v.302 TOOLS USED: sPatch (thanx to Mike Clifton), gimp v1.0 (conversion tga - jpg, image maps), link.inc from Chris Colefax (thanx also to this adress) RENDER TIME: 31 h 47 m 46 s (while using +SP32) HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90 (48 MB RAM, linux) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When I found out that the current topic was water I decided to participate for the first time. Being a maritime soul now far away from the coast I've chosen a scene that portraits the sea. What you see here is a male humpback whale in its typical position for "singing". They create wonderful tunes when they are in their breeding and mating waters (for example the caribbean sea or the waters around the hawaian island). They take a position which is head down. If you can You should listen to one of the existing recordings of their singing. I pictured a rather dramatic moment when a diver approaches the singing whale near a anchored seasign while a small school of fish escapes from this scene. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The whale and the diver (except for the air tank,valve and breathing automat which were created by simple csg) were created by using sPatch (again: thank you Mike for this wonderful tool!). While I used only very simple textures for the diver (I am kinda lazy), I used two image maps for the whale. One for the body and one for the flippers. To get a cast for the image map I made a rendering of the whale from the side with an orthographic camera, no lights just a white background. That way I got a nearly B&W picture of the whale that I loaded into gimp, inverted and then filled out in the desired way. I only had to scale, rotate and translate this image map according to the former camera position, and voila there it is. The sPatch files are also included in the zip-file. Feel free to use them. I would be glad to hear from anyone who found them useful. The fish were also made by csg. They consist of a scaled sphere and three triangular patches that are clipped by two planes. In their simple way I really like them. They were positioned by a simple custom program in a random manner (position and direction). The bubbles of the whale were randomly positioned in a cone (the biggest bubbles at the top and scaled in the y-direction) while the three bubble clusters made by the diver were positioned along a line (the biggest bubbles first,in a higher position and scaled in y-direction). The older clusters are the more are they stretched. The seasign was made by two cones and a cylinder but only the lower cone is visible. Believe it or not (or just look at the sources) ... it is fire-red. Its green-grey lokk (as nearly anything underwater) is a effect of the surface plane which is realy a plane with a bump surface. The bumps were scaled in all three directions (<10,2,2>) which results to my oppion in a sea surface that you would find at a calm day. It was given an ior of 1.333 and has a transparent pigment laid onto it. The tricky part was were the caustics. My first test using the faked caustics lead to nice pics but the caustics are faked indeed. The lightpaths were curved so that this method is not usable. I decided to use 40 randomly distributed spotlights in the viewing direction. I am not quit satisfied with that but due to my time consuming job I ran out of time so this has to work. BTW, when I looked through the former competions, just in middle of this work, I found a submission by Nathan O'Brien (I admire his work) that shows a similiar scene. No copy was intended, but due to the advanced level of my model I decided against dumping it. I hope you understand that. Any comments are really welcome. This picture is dedicated to my wife and my little boys for giving me the time to complete this work.