TITLE: Ave Maria
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmave.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmave.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 

  PaintShop Pro 5.1 (jpeg conversion, moon)

RENDER TIME: 
    14h 55m 37s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A moonlit religious procession.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

With more rendering than coding, I can tell you!

This is based on the final scenes in Disney's Fantasia, where a
procession of people march by lanternlight to a church to sing
their praises to God, to the strains of Franz Schubert's Ave Maria.
I made this recreation entirely from memory - the last time I
watched Fantasia was a couple of years ago. I suppose if I go back
and look at it, I'll see Disney's animators did a much better job
than I did... :-)

I was too busy this round to spend my usual amount of time on
research and modelling, so I used a lot of media to hide the simple
primitive shapes that make up the scene. The media took the most
time to get right. It is a double layer of scattering and absorbing
media with crackle patterns at two different turbulence settings
and scales, inside a thin box in front of the camera. It looks more
impressive with a higher gamma, but I dimmed the final image a lot
to get the night effect.

The ground is a simple heightfield, the people are just stretched
spheres(!) and the crosses are two cylinders. The moon is a
hand-drawn image map. The tree is an image map re-used from my
Laboratory entry. Chris Colefax's Galaxy.inc has been used for
the stars and Milky Way. There are only 4 light sources: the
lanterns and the moon. I tried using up to 20 lanterns, but with
the media I'd still be rendering that full size next year.

Obviously this could use more detail, but unfortunately I just
didn't have the time this round. :-(

As usual, all this is hand-coded in the POV-Ray text editor,
and all the source code is in the zip file.