EMAIL: irtc_mail@yahoo.co.uk NAME: Richard Webster TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Maid of the Mist COUNTRY: England WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: PaintShop Pro for jpeg RENDER TIME: 6 hours HARDWARE USED: AMD Duron 1.1GHz 128MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Maid of the Mist approaching Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All modelling was done in code and the full source is in the zip file. The main objects in the scene are: - Falls The surface of the falls is made from two meshes generated from functions. The texture of the near-falls is done by environment-mapping. An image-map is rendered into a separate file, then the image is uv-mapped onto the mesh using the components of the surface normal as the u and v values. This gives a watery look without having to spend time on lighting, reflection and refraction. The texture of the far falls is a random pattern. The spray on the near falls is a blob object with spheres following a path down the falls with an increasing random spread. - Mist The whole scene in enclosed in a sphere with media to give haze. The mist at the bottom of each of the falls is a row of merged spheres containing turbulent media. - Lagoon The lagoon texture blends between two textures: a white pattern with blue patches at the far-falls and a blue pattern with white patches near the viewer. The ripples around the boat come from a normal-map with a cylindrical pattern which reduces the disturbance to the normal with increasing distance from the boat. - Boat The main structure of the boat is a height field rendered into a separate file which is used in a CSG with holes cut in the sides by boxes. The caped people are simple models with a sphere for a head and a cone for a body. These are randomly scattered on the decks.