TITLE: Watering Hole
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jscene01.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.1; Paint Shop Pro (signature and image
compression)

RENDER TIME: 
    Approx. 1 1/2 hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 266; 128 mg RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  Hopefully, this should be pretty much self-explanatory... a number of animals
gathered around a watering hole in the jungle. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  (A note regarding gamma for this entry... hopefully, the gamma is correct on
this.  However, it was created using four different monitors (two monitors
almost caught fire during the making of this image... hopefully not a bad
omen), and with having to constantly readjust the brightness and contrast, I'm
not sure I got things right in the end.  I apologize for the inconvenience of
having to adjust the gamma, if in fact it does need to be adjusted.)
 
  When I saw that the topic for this round was The Wilderness, I let out a heavy
sigh... definitely not my strongest topic.  But I decided to give it a shot,
and here are the results, for better or for worse (I'll let you be the judge of
that.)

  I started with the ground and the background.  The ground is simply a textured
box, with a curving-edge conic prism cut out for the hole and a cylinder of
water.  The background consists of three thin boxes with partially-transparent
textures to simulate foliage, and behind that a cloudy summer sky.  To cut down
on the rendering time, I rendered the four background layers as a separate
image and image-mapped it to a box.

  Next came the animals.  I wasn't sure how well I could do them, but I like the
way they came out... I think they look decent, at least.  I did them in three
steps: first, I did them in CSG to get the basic shape and proportions.  Then I
replaced the CSG with blobs (each animal is a single blob object, consisting of
almost 200 spherical components, all placed by hand.)  The last step was
tweaking the placement of the individual components to improve the shaping,
using trial-and-error.  It was a somewhat pain-staking process, but I think
they look pretty good considering it wasn't done using a modeller.  Blobs play
a pretty major role in this picture.  In addition to the animals, all the rock
formations, flowers, and the two tree branches were done using blobs.

  The bushes in the background are the same ones I used in my Ruins entry, using
a (hopefully!) less glaring color.  The leaves hanging down in the top
foreground are individual leaves from these bushes, with the shaping adjusted
(again using a curved-edge prism) and a different texture used.  I think these
are the weakest parts of the picture, but foliage simply isn't my strong
point.

  Lastly came the fog, just to add an extra touch to the scene.  A pretty basic
three-layer ground fog, but I've never used fog before, so I think I did all
right with it.

  That's it for this entry.  Again, I really appreciate any comments/criticism
people are willing to give... it's very helpful to me.  I'd also like to thank
everyone who took the time to comment on my last entry... they gave me a
well-needed boost of self-confidence!  And a special thanks to David Morgan,
for posting information on max_trace_level to the mailing list... it came at
just the right time to solve the problems I was having with my entry.