TITLE: Guilin
NAME: Maarten Hofman
COUNTRY: USA (originally The Netherlands)
EMAIL: maarten_hofman@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://jen.mosha.net
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: guilin.jpg
ZIPFILE: guilin.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    GIMP (to properly create the JPG file)

RENDER TIME: 
    20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 1.7 GHz, 256 MB running linux

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Guilin, China, with a sun at the horizon.

Credits to Luis Valoyes for his "Fake Plasteek Trees" and Kurt Bangert for his
"Palm grove".

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Originally I had created a power station
(http://horta.urmc.rochester.edu:8080/~mhofman/raytrace/powestat2.jpg) but
unfortunately this doesn't really qualify for the "natural origin" part of the
competition, as a power station is far from natural. Another option would've
been to have a magnified landscape, but after my molecular forest fire in the
animations competition, I didn't think that would be appropriate either.

So I went with the "boring" landscape. To make it special, I decided to focus
mostly on working with the light. I reused some of the components of the power
station I had made (the water, smoke and landscape texture map) an experimented
with various settings. When I discovered that emission in media actually makes
a good light source, I decided to use that (there are still other light sources
in the image, but those are meant to light the sun which is hiding behind the
clouds, otherwise it would become too obvious).

The biggest problem occurred when I had finished the image and had created an
exquisite PNG file. After compression to JPG using xv, the reflection on the
water turned bland. Even at the 100etting, half of the colours disappeared.
Only with GIMP I managed to convert it to JPG in a reasonable way, and this is
the result.