EMAIL:Varyk@aol.com NAME:Neal M.Hicks TOPIC:Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE:Berg COUNTRY:USA WEBPAGE:(none) RENDERER USED:POV-Ray 3.1a TOOLS USED:LView 31 RENDER TIME:13m 53s HARDWARE USED:Pentium II 400Mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: With Water the subject and Winter coming on, I decided to have lots of water in different states. Hence, icebergs on the water in fog under overcast skies. Just about everything in the scene is water, except for the seaweed. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I just got POV-Ray, and have been wading through the tutorials and help files for some time, working examples. This is my first origional scene, with no rendering experience except through learning POV-Ray. Making this scene was a tutorial all its own. Every object required me to learn how a process worked or a technique was applied. I drew heavily on examples as templates, but by the time the scene was done, every object was origional. I started with just a simple camera, a lightsource high up, and a cylinder 'floating' in a transparent blue plane. I knew icebergs tend to melt more around their waterline in calm waters, and after many permutations of spheres on cones with subtracted torii around the middle, I decided to learn more about lathe objects, gave it a good bulk under the waterline, and used a plane to chop a piece off the back at an angle to make it asymmetrical. I was reconciled to it being smooth, polished from wind and rain. The texture 'Mottled' came from a desire to give it a realistic look. iceberg ice is bluish due to air and minerals frozen into it, and the melting surface would look white in places. I used a bozo texture map to pull them together. I strected and rotated the combined texture to make it look like the ice formed in layers in some glacier, and had formed at an angle to its current floating position. The transparency of the Blue_Ice texture allowed some light to bounce around inside like an icecube, while the bumps on Snow_Tex created both a wavy surface and some artifacts on top of the berg rather suggestive of passing birds! I then searched in vain for some sort of water.inc on the cd-rom but didn't find any, so I used glass.inc for T_Winebottle_Glass, a nice green seawater color. The ripples I added, centered on the berg, showed me how the refractive properties of the glass textures worked well for the underwater portion of the berg, adding visual interest. to keep the sea from being too transparent, I added a black plane. I tried to use a black fog, but I couldn't make ground fog under y=0, perhaps I could've raised all the elements and camera but the black plane sufficed. I added another lathe object, chopped, rotated, scaled and translated to make an ice mountain in the background. I added the texture between two scalings because the texture needed to be larger to work at a distance. I added a fog to make the ice mountain appear distant, and colored the ambient light an icy blue to chill the scene. At first the background statement seemed unnecessary, but its absence darkened my glass ocean so I left it in. At the last minute I decided to layer in a seaweed texture on the ocean, and this was one of the most challenging parts! I adapted an example of a granite color map for rust spots in the tutorial, changing the colors, frequency and scale to make bits of seaweed strewn about. When I layered the seaweed onto the glass, the refractive properties disappeared, or at least the refraction in the ripples. I tried switching the order of the glass and seaweed, but I don't know enough yet to figure this out, so I put the seaweed on another plane just barely above the water. I was pretty happy with the scene when I converted it to a JPEG with LView31. I felt it had a sparse, Japanese-garden kind of feel, and was very cold looking.