TITLE: No Man's Land
NAME: Johnny Yip
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: parallel94_53tx@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/~quasarplas
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION
JPGFILE: feather.jpg
ZIPFILE: feather.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.5


TOOLS USED: 
    Povray Editor, Adobe Photoshop (conversion of image to JPG)


RENDER TIME: 
    38 min for the background
             7hr 42min 19sec for final scene


HARDWARE USED: 
    PII-450, 128Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

In the world where much of the Earth is covered with water, mankind ceased to
exist.
Not by a natural disaster nor by a disease, Men wiped themselves out with the
weapons
they built.  In the land where no man exists, there we can find peace.

        This is the end of civilization, the end of hope...

             ...yet true peace has finally arrived...

:~(


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

-= The thing with the blurring =-
Focal blur was used (in Povray) to make the feather stand out.  In the picture,
the feather
lies in the focal point.

-= The thing with the texture mapping =-
(You will get what i mean if you go into the source code)
It is not really the background of the image...
What happened is that when I tried to put the smoke together with the rest of
the scene, the
reflective (reflection 0.6) water creates these nasty black shadows on its
surface.  And I
couldn't figure out how to prevent these shadows.
 At this point, I have one week left... 
Thus, as a result, I was forced to do it the texture-mapping way.  I first
render the water
and the ruin pieces to an image.  Then I used that image as the texture of a box
(carefully
rotated to preserve the original size of the texture) in the final scene.
 End of story 

-= The Smoke =-
Media with light-scattering particles, nothing really special except the fact
that these
media objects love to create black spots whenever they intersect each other.  I
spent much
time trying to space them out so that these shadows will not appear.  If someone
have any
hints or suggestions as to how to solve the problem I just described, please
send me an
email, thank you so much!~

-= The Water, the ruin, and the lamp posts =-
The water is a reflective surface with normal bumps (wave and granite).  The
ruins (these
are the black pieces of "what-the-hell-are-those"), they are actually
height-fields.  As
for all the other stuff like lamp-posts, iron bar, wire, telephone post (if you
can see
them), they are simple CSG with various textures on them.  Yes, the image is
black and
white, the only coloured object you will see is the feather.

-= Finally the feather =-
No CSG, no polygon, no bezier mesh... it's all just a simple image map (sorry,
but I only
have a few days left when I started making the feather).

*some of the files are too big for the zip (ex. texture files)