TITLE: The Ice Mine NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: icemine.jpg ZIPFILE: icemine.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 RC 2 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor Paintshop Pro (to add copyright) RENDER TIME: 1 day 7 hours HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Ice Mine lies on a distant planet... We call it "The Ice Mine" not because of it's contents, which are in fact precious minerals, but because of the harshness of it's location. This photo shows trains carrying minerals from the mine to a transporter ship, so that they can be carried to manufacturing plants in more hospitable climes. The mine is behind us, further up the hill the photographer is stood on. Permanent sub-zero temperatures produce hostile conditions for those that work here. Though it's not too cold, as can be seen by the presence of snow flakes which can only occur in certain temperature ranges. Viewing tip: I've found this image actually looks very good when you zoom in on it. There's a lot of details that you just don't notice when the image is it's normal size! Or maybe this just means my monitor's broken!? :) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was another round that I decided not to enter, and then changed my mind after coming up with some neat effects. Note: all textures, objects and effects in this scene were created with povray. A number of things combined to form the basis of this: Firstly, a couple of people said my links image in the previous round had a sci-fi art feel. Secondly, I had an idea bouncing round my head about making simple objects look more convincing by using procedural detailing on them. And thirdly, I saw some pictures by the sci-fi artist Chris Foss, which seemed to bring it all together. Anyway, this lead to an experiment, where I created a ball, textured it with a complex layered texture using the cells pigment and some object textures to write blocks of text. I also built an aerial and a docking hatch, and spread them randomly over the object. This looked cool so I changed the underlying shape to something a bit more elaborate, and that was pretty much how the red and blue ship was created! The trains are based on superellipsoids. The bulk of the work on these went on refining the algorithm used for the ship into a slightly more useful include file (though I never found time to retro-fit this onto the ship). Also the code to lay trains along a spline projected onto the ground using the trace function took a fair bit of work, as did the tank tracks (which are still incomplete but the blur mostly hides that). Other objects in the scene: the snow flakes are a mesh object, containing 100000 flakes within a box near the camera, the effect of distant flakes is acheived using some turbulent fog. The ground is a couple of isosurfaces, and to my surprise is the slowest element of the scene (when replaced by a plane the scene renders more than 3 times quicker!). The piles of minerals in the train carts are arranged using a macro I created to pile stuff in boxes (it's not finished yet but it looks good enough for this image). The colour of the mineral was picked in isolation from the rest of the scene, and so looks a bit wierd, but I kinda like it. I've put a few fake photographic effects into the scene (all done with pov of course). There's focal blur, obviously, which improved the look of the scene a lot but unfortunately I can't afford the time to trace it with more blur samples so it's a bit noisy. To acheive the other photo effects I encased the camera in a hollow sphere. The sphere has a transmit value greater than 1 to stretch the contrast values within the scene. It has a slight red tint towards the top left of the picture and blue to the bottom right, as well as a crand finish to add noise to the image though that was toned down a lot when I put the blur in. The camera also has a normal statement, to slightly distort the image meaning that there's no clinically straight lines in it. For the record, I've been doing a lot of overtime at work. working 9am to 8pm most days and some weekends! This means that most of this image was produced by somebody very tired and overworked, so it probably has dozens of mistakes I've not noticed! Nonetheless I'm very happy with the result, there's not much I'd improve even if I had time. I'm very keen to find out what people think, because I'm simply too exhausted from work to really form a detailed opinion myself! :) Cheers Tek