TITLE: Glidepath
NAME: John L. Rose
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: jrose@nbnet.nb.ca
WEBPAGE: http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/jrose/index.htm
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: winger.jpg
ZIPFILE: winger.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 68K 3.02a

TOOLS USED: 
    none

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 21 minutes 52.0 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Macintosh Centris 660av

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Three red "things" are circling, possibly for a landing, around a fourth
one in the water. I was going for an elegant simplicity sort of thing, 
with this one.

"Wingie" (as in "wing thingy") and "Winger" were working names for the red
object, and it has stuck. (No connection with actress Debra Winger.)

I wanted to keep it a bit of a mystery as to the exact nature of the red 
things, as well as what the fourth one is doing in the water. Is it 
surfacing after a dive? Is it sinking? Is it in distress? I don't like to
spoil it by giving away the whole story.

Some of the sources of inspiration for it are: 
- migrating geese/ducks/swans, which we have a fair number of here in 
  Sackville, New Brunswick, which has a waterfowl park;
- the recently televised made-for-TV movie "Moby Dick" starring Patrick
  Stewart;
- narwhals swimming in the Arctic sea;
- sharks;
- an old beer commercial (of all things) on TV about 25 years ago, featuring
  the schooner "Bluenose II" sailing out of a fog bank;
- an origami-style paper airplane designed by Professor James M. Sakoda, for
  Scientific American's "Great International Paper Airplane Competition", held
  in '66-'67.

A recent documentary on the beach culture pointed out that up until the last
century, the sea was viewed with great dread, as the source of great menace
and fearsome creatures. People (Europeans, anyway) didn't want to go near the
sea, if they could at all help it - not even to walk along the shore.
No wonder they were such poor swimmers.

Music of choice while viewing this image: Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


There are only five objects in this entire scene, and four of them are four
instances of the same object.

All of the "winger" objects are the same declared bicubic_patch, rotated
and translated.

The water surface is a simple plane with a ripple normal and a bozo pigment
map. The white component of the pigment map is a crackle pigment map.

The source file is completely self-contained and does not even use any 
standard "include" files.

I ended up using an anti-aliasing threshold of 0.2 (as opposed to the default
0.3) because otherwise the reflections in the ripples tended to break up into
dots.

The hardest part was deciding what type and colour of fog to use, combined
with how high to make the reflection value . The type 2 fog allowed a lot of
the sky colour to be reflected in the water, but this made it look more like
some warm tropical lagoon. With a darker type 1 fog, the water has a more
menacing North Atlantic overcast feel to it.

- Pict to JPEG conversion with GIFConverter 2.3.7