TITLE: First Light
NAME: Devon Zachary
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: Musicman@vip.Net
WEBPAGE: (Vue d'Esprit Only) WWW.Wingate-Consultans.com/Vue/Mel.htm
TOPIC: First Contact
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: firstxli.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Vue d'Esprit 2

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Windows Paint

RENDER TIME: 
    somewheres around an hour

HARDWARE USED: 
    P75, My Brain, my mouse, my keyboard, my fingers..

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The sun is just about to pop over the horizon (ever see this at 3 in the
morning?). It's making it's first contact on to the ground of the day. 
The farm is beginning to awake. Clouds spread and make the sunlight 
dapple along the farm.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Wierd as this may sound, Although originally the farm and stuff was a
DXF created with sPatch, through a crazy chain of events, I ended up
using a terrain(height field) for the farm buildings. Then, once again,
it became a polygon mesh, and then another terrain. The result was a
mesh-terrain combination that was 1.3 million polygons big.
The trees are slightly modified plum trees(solid growth) that come with
Vue d'Esprit. (although I was going to use a Transparency map).

The atmosphere was the hardest(and, the most maddening) part to create, 
I had to redo, redo, redo, change lighting and redo it about a bizillion
(well not quite) times. But the result is quite realistic.

Here's an interesting note: Although I did this in Vue d'Esprit, It could
be converted to Pov-Ray without to-much diffuculty. Here's what you could
do:

Use Media for the sun, map it to a sphere or disk, then create several
different
cloud layers, map the to planes, position them slightly abouve each other
and rotate them a bit.
Then do the whole front in a bitmap editor. (This would be rather, full
, use of an imagemap, but I sort of think that would be cheating.)

Windows Paint was used only for the transparancy map that makes up the 
first farm house.

I was going to include source, but once again, it was rather large. (6.3
meg!) I may to a polygon reduction and post it later when its done. (on
M. Harts site: www.wingate-consultants.com/vue )