TITLE: Crop Circle
NAME: Mauro Pierluigi
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: mauro@pmworld.net
WEBPAGE: www.pmworld.net
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mpcc.jpg
ZIPFILE: mpcc.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1a for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 5 for image maps and height field

RENDER TIME: 
    About 5 minutes, most of them for parsing

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6 3D 233MHz, 64Mb RAM, Win98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Early morning in a vaste country area. Farmers gets awake and some strange and
large drawings on their fields waits to be admired. Later during the day
someone in a small airplane will take this picture for the next day's
newspaper.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This was pretty simple, an height field, a plane and some fog. That's all! I
would just say that the height field file is high resolution (3000x3000 pixels)
to save the details. I wanted to add some motion or focal blur (or something
like that) to give the effect that the picture was took by an airplane flying
over the crop circle, but after the rendering the effect came out by itself (or
sort of...) using the image maps resized to 400% in the code. I used (as
experiment) AA Threshold=0.5 and it looks ok to me.