TITLE: Coral Sea NAME: Hugh & Anne Gregory COUNTRY: CANADA EMAIL: albiaprime@aol.com WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/agre108/crafts/sagewood.html TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: coralsea.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, sPatch, 3D Win, Blob Sculptor, Paintshop Pro Demo RENDER TIME: 49 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 160 Mhz, 40megsRAM; PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM Important Note: All of our Images produced to date are best viewed with your monitor adjusted to following settings.. Brightness = 100%, Contrast = 100% (So for those who found our Deer Lake entry "too dark", try looking at it with your monitor adjusted to the above settings and you will now see it all.) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Since the development of self contained underwater breathing apparatus our explorations of "Inner Space" under our planet's seas have opened up new, alien and exciting worlds beyond belief. Our inspiration for this months entry is the incredible explorations made over the years by Capt. Jacques Cousteau and his team aboard the good ship Calypso. He and his team did set up a star shaped home some 30 feet down in the Red Sea years ago and lived there for over a month. Now years later, mankind has taken the process one step further and developed an underwater city. "Coral Sea" is the view out the connecting tube window, just outside the front door of our pressure dome home, looking across the sea- scape to the domes of our neighbours. The reefs in the area of our city were decimated by pollution, thus the green slime of algae blooms cover many seamounts. But our city's collective goal is to "reforest" so to speak and clean up the area around our city so that coral and other aquatic life may return. The first results of our efforts can be seen out the window as new coral formations begin to grow and the fish and other sea life have returned. We even cleared all the algae off a small area outside our home so that we could observe and document what and when sea life returns to the now clean and safe to use stretch of sand. It is a sparse seascape now but imagine what it will look like in the years to come as life returns to the "Coral Sea". DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my fourth and our third joint IRTC entry. This entry was constructed in four phases, Research, Exploratory Layout, Construction and Object Placement Fine Tuning Phase One: Research. While my husband ploughed through his old National Geographic Magazine collection for inspiration on how to make an underwater city, I looked through the underwater photos I had taken in Sept 1999 while we were snorkling over Australia's Great Barrier Reef, just off of Green Island. Phase Two: Exploratory Layout. First Hugh built a city of simple connecting tubes and habitat domes and we "flew" the Moray Camera around the wireframe until we found view that we liked. Then I made two seamounts with the Leveler heightfield generator and fitted them into our proposed location for a test view. After some manipulation we had them in a place we liked and I proceeded to generate another Leveler heightfield for the rocky bottom in the forground. For the drifting sand in the immediate foreground surrounding the rocks, Hugh turned the rocks heightfield 90 degrees and dropped it a few feet. Phase Three: Construction. Having decided on our locale, Hugh went into fine detail in constructing the domes and the connecting tube walkways. At this point we were not sure if we were going to be on the inside looking out or the outside looking down, so he incorporated details such as the load bearing arches, black rivits, curved window frames, curved glass, interior lighting with electrical fittings and double hulls for the pressure shells. All of course done with Morey 3.1 . I took the photos I had selected from our Great Barrier Reef swim mentioned above and started designing fish, sea anenomes, giant clams, coral and sea plants. The coral clumps I constructed with Blob Sculptor. The Fish, Giant Clams were done with S-Patch. The Sea Anenomes, the Fan Coral and Plate Coral were done with beziers in Moray. These were then placed roughly were we wanted them and had another session of "flying" the camera around, doing test renders, to select the vantage point and direction of aim for our Camera to capture our final image. With this point determined, we moved on to several weeks of fine tuning and test rendering. Phase Four: Object Placement Fine Tuning. This was perhaps the longest phase of the construction of "Coral Sea". To start with Hugh took each of our two seamount heightfields, made three copies of each, then placed them about a 1/4 to 1/2 foot above the original and increased their scale in all axis by 2 feet. This allowed the heightfields to nest one on top of the other without touching. Using semi transparent textures he was able to create the wavy algae plant growth carpet visual effect. At the same time I worked on texture developement for my marine life (both plant and animal) as well as developing the rippled sand and the rocky bottom textures. As I can do randomness better then Hugh, who is more structure oriented in outlook, I roughly placed my plants and animals and then he would take over and using a measuring stick he made called appropriately Stadia Rod, he would do close ups of all the sea floor plants and animals to make sure that nothing was left hovering in "mid air" to use a phrase. Hugh also made a clear blue sky by eliminating the white parts of the Moray texture Carribean Blue Sky and then took the wavy sand texture I had made and modified it into the sea surface above our city. Then he added a large 50 foot twin screw boat, with cabin and wheelhouse. And in the dome on top of the sea mount in the distance he installed a bunk bed and curtains I had made in one window and in the other he hung a large framed picture on the wall that could be seen through the window. We wanted a landscape portrait to hang on that dome's wall, so the image we used in this framed picture is our own work, namely "Deer Lake". Last but not least from a technical view point, water becomes opaque with distance, so to make things "fade" into obscurity in the background we activated the Fog feature of Moray. The final touch was to turn on the lights inside the domes and tubeways, so that light could shine out the windows and hit the seabed. The 800 by 600 BMP took just over 52 minutes to render on POV using my husband's Pentium II - 350. The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with the Demo Version of Paint Shop Pro I downloaded off the internet set to 2% compression to get the file down under the IRTC maximum file size of 250kb. We Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright "Coral Sea" is Copyright(c)2000 Hugh & Anne Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.