TITLE: Compartmentalized Sea NAME: Ben Weston COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tekf@ukonline.co.uk WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: partized.jpg ZIPFILE: partized.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.1 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor RENDER TIME: 6h 07m 24s HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The collector was feeling in a pacific mood today... He went to the cabinet that held his collection of oceans. Selecting the door to the pacific, he pulled the handle and released the sea into the room. Before long the water had formed the horizon, just in time for a picturesque sunset. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This rather surreal image grew out of a brainstorming session of things to do with the sea. The original idea was simply a cabinet full of cubes of sea. After creating that scene I had the idea of opening one of the compartments and allowing the sea to pour out. This led logically enough to having the entire cabinet in the middle of the ocean, fuelling it (though I tried a few other ideas along the way). The sunset came from another image I'd been playing with for the sea topic, and it was sheer luck that the two colour schemes went so well together. I then moved the camera and changed the aspect ratio so you can 'read' the scene from left to right, i.e. the cabinet full of sea has an open door which is pouring water out to form a sea which flows off into the sunset (I deliberately made the picture too big to fit in (most) web browser windows, so you have to scroll across, I like it that way). The final touch was adding the splash. Details of how I modelled the various components are as follows: The entire scene was created in POVray 3.1's scripting language, including all textures, heightfields, models, etc. I'm a programmer by trade, and so this approach suits me well. (I've tried to include all the relevant source files in the zip file, as well as an explanation of how to render it, 'cause it really bugs me when I download the source for an image but I can't make it work! I also included a close up of the splash, because it looks pretty cool) THE CABINET is done with a couple of while loops, one to create shelves and one to create "struts" (the vertical shelves), all of which are just boxes, plus another box on the back of the cabinet. the visible sides of the shelves are texured with wood, but the interior of each cupboard is coloured in a white to black gradient, to give nicer reflections in the water. The doors are also boxes, with cylinders taken out to add a bit more detail, made out of a slightly reflective, mostly see through, pale green-blue material. THE WATER comes in four basic types: The sea surface was created first, it's just a flat plane in highly reflective, opaque, dark green with a bump map on it. The bump map is POV's crackle texture with two layers of turbulence at different scales (using the warp command). The water in the boxes is formed from a height field generated by the same texture as used by the bump mapping! The pouring water is a julia fractal, rotated and scaled to the appropriate position, with a cylinder differenced from the underside to stop bits of it passing through lower cupboards. The splash was added last, and consists of a blob round a particle system. The particle system is done entirely with #while loops and just positions a bunch of spheres as if they've been fired up and out from a ring around the point where the pouring water enters the sea. The material is the same as the pouring water, except I lowered the refractive index and made the colour white and more transparent, because the splash was looking too "heavy". THE SKY consists of 3 gradients layered on top of each other; a blue one, a thinner green one, and an even thinner red one. All three gradients fade to white at the horizon, and transparent at the other end so the colour only becomes apparent between the two extremes. The blue bit is what gives the dark ripples on the water, as it reflects the top of the sky sphere. THE SUN is just lens flare, using sunset1 from nkflare.inc. It looks a little blurry because of the focal blur. I added FOCAL BLUR to the final image, but only a tiny amount. The lens flare is created so close to the camera that any significant amount of blurring makes it vanish all together! But the subtle blur was enough to slightly soften the horizon and the lens flare, and sorted out some interference patterns on the distant sea. It also "cleans" the rest of the image, removing dotty patterns that were arising from all the small details in the scene by taking more samples per ray.