TITLE: Begin of rainy season
NAME: Micha Riser
COUNTRY: Switzerland
EMAIL: mriser@usa.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/7992/
TOPIC: water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rain.jpg
ZIPFILE: rain.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POVRay 3.1.Linux.gcc (unofficial version compiled by Ronald L. Parker)


TOOLS USED: 

    kedit (text editor), Computer


RENDER TIME: 

    2 hours 9 minutes (7766s)

MEMORY USED:
    51.3 MB


HARDWARE USED: 

    developing: Pentium 166 MMX, 64 MB RAM
    final rendering: Pentium II 300, 64 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A man  in a region with  dry and rainy seasons  goes down on  his knees to the 
earth which has got brittle and torn by the long dry spell when the first rain
drops for some  months fall down.  He thanks God that  the dryness and with it
the period of food and water shortage is got to stop and months of growing and
crop will follow.  Within a few days the brown and dull earth will change into
a green and fruitful landscape.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The landscape: 
  A used POVRay itself  to create a high field image and put a crackle texture
  on it to show  the torn earth. Finally I put some weeds  onto the high field.

The rain:
  I decided not  to use a plane with transparency and 'rain lines' to simulate
  the rain but I set lots of rain drops in the scene.  You can see that if you 
  look at the man: before the man are only a few rains drops.

The man:
  For the cloth I first made a simple shape  out of blobs which gave the basis 
  for it. Then I used a kind of distort map: I put lots of blob spheres in the 
  space around the basis cloth with a low threshold.  So these spheres weren't 
  visible themselves but they influenced the blobs of the basis cloth and so I 
  simulated the folds.
  Hands and feets of the man I got from two kind persons.

Because of the rain drops the picture needed antialiasing. After some trying I
used finally antialiasing type 2, threshold 0.05, levels 2, jitter 0.4  (ergo:
+AM2 +A0.05 +R2 +J0.4)  what gave  a agreeable compromise  between quality and 
render time.




BY THE WAY:

Have you yet seen the POVRay Objects Collection?
It's located at http://twysted.net/povobj/.

So if you've some good objects made yourself and want everybody to be able to 
access to it this collection would by a good place to do so.