TITLE: Sea Battles NAME: Kevin Jackson-Mead COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: jacksonmead@mindspring.com WEBPAGE: http://www.mindspring.com/~jacksonmead TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: kjmsea.jpg ZIPFILE: kjmsea.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows TOOLS USED: SEA Graphics and Animation Viewer (http://www.photodex.com/products/dos/index.html) WinMegaPov 0.5a RENDER TIME: 1 hour, 1 minute, 32 seconds HARDWARE USED: AMD-K7 500MHZ, 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I had a friend over the other night, and we were looking for something to do. Being too lazy to go out and do anything, I pulled out an old game called "Sea Battles". This was the rare 1967 "Real Water" edition. It didn't sell too well, due to the fact that many of the boards opened up while they were still in the stores, and the boxes became soaked. Since it's so rare, it's probably worth a few bucks, but I'd rather keep it around to play with. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I thought I'd keep it simple for my first real image. The boats are prisms. The game board, game box, and picutre on the wall are boxes. The picture frame is a difference of boxes. The table is a box with cylinders for legs. The picture on the cover of the game box is an image map that I made with POV (the image and source are included in the source zip). The framed picture on the wall is also an image map (image and source included in zip) of a picture that I made using the first macro I created. This one was done in MegaPOV because of how it treats cylindrical lights. Speaking of macros, the little "Now With Real Water" sticker on the game box was made using my second macro, one that creates star-shaped prisms given the number of points and the inner and outer radii. The textures on the table and picture frame are from the standard woods.inc include file. The textures on the ships are from the standard metals.inc include file. For the water, I started with one of the samples in the POV documentation, and then I changed the normal (slightly) and the pigment. The box cover has a crackle pattern scaled down pretty small. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it was the best I could do with what I know so far. I also set the ambient on the box cover up, since it was in shadow. I messed around with putting other lights in and positioning the box in other ways, but I was not happy with those results. Again, I'm not entirely pleased with how it turned out, but I guess it will have to do. My main concern was that it was visible, since it is important to the scene. If you can, imagine that the framed picture is painted on black velvet. I didn't want to mess with trying to get that texture. And, if I remember correctly from black velvet pictures of Jesus in my grandparents' house, viewed from a certain distance, there isn't a whole lot of visible texturing on a black velvet painting. The room itself (walls, ceiling, and floor) have no texture. Next time I do an indoor scene, I'll play with wall and rug textures. Because I'm into the programming part, I decided to do some random placing of objects in the scene. The ships on the board are randomly placed on the appropriate side, and the side board pieces on the near side are randomly up or on their side, and they have a random rotation. I played with different seed values for the various placements until I got ones that I was happy with. After making this image, I did a search on "Sea Battles" and turned up some games. I found a computer game called "Admiral: Sea Battles", which was put out by Megamedia (http://www.megamedia.com/ - doesn't appear to be around any more). I also found a pencil-and-paper wargame by Warp Spawn Games entitled "Sea Battles" (http://www.angelfire.com/games2/warpspawn/Seab.html). I also found a reference (http://www.theminiaturespage.com/rules/ww2/lastsea.html) to an out-of-print game called "The Last Sea Battles". It is a miniatures game designed by Keith Robinson and published in 1976 by Leicester Micromodels Ltd. I also found a handheld electronic game called "Sea Battle" (http://www.tetravalence.com.hk/product/pro_1.htm) made by Tetravalence Electronics Manufacturing Ltd. I also found what looks like a Java version on Battleship called "Sea Battle" at the Games Park web site (http://www.gamespark.com/seabattle.html). Speaking of Battleship (http://www.battleship.com), I think the phrase "The Game of Naval Warfare" might have been on that game, but I can't remember. Please note that neither I nor my IRTC submission have absolutely nothing to do with any of these games or companies. Finally, if you've made it this far into the description, I'd like to thank a few people. Many thanks to the people of the povray.binaries.images group. Thanks to them, I got some feedback on various pieces of this, including being pointed to SEA (see link at top of file), the program which I used to convert the final PNG image to JPEG. And a big thanks to my wife, Cat, for feedback and suggestions on the image. It is much better because of her input.