TITLE: Stone Circle In Lake
NAME: James Taylor
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: jimbobjim@blueyonder.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.jimbobjim.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jt_stone.jpg
ZIPFILE: jt_stone.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.5
        Terragen
        IrfanView
        Crossroads
        Poseray
        

RENDER TIME: 



HARDWARE USED: 
    IBM PC, AMD-K6 350MHz, 8Gb Drive, 192Mb Ram, Windows 98


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A tranquil, dusk scene showing some very old technology. I suspect this may be
approcing the grey area of off-topicness, so I'll try and justify the inclusion
of a stone circle as Old Technology. Basically I was thinking along the lines
that these stone circles and the methods used to construct them represented in
their time, the highest technological achievment that could be made. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The inspiration for this image came from a black and white photo of a lake
(without the stone cirlcle) which I found in a photography book.

There's nothing especially complicated about the techniques used in this image,
but here's a quick run down:
The sky was generated in Terragen at 900x900 and then mapped onto a large,
hollow sphere in POV. The landmass in the background is just a simple HF and
the trees were generated using Gilles Tran's MakeTree macro (www.oyonale.com).
Much of the time spent on this image was finding a way to use lots of these
trees without using gigabytes of mem. In fact there are 40 trees in the
background which are chosen at random from 5 "base" trees and then transformed
in some way. The water is just a plane with a bozo normal (based on ideas from
Christoph Horman
http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013390/pov/water/index.html), although some
time was spent trying different colour combinations and reflection parameters
to get the water to look just right. Lastly, the stones are isosurface spheres
deformed with an agate pigment function and utilise a texture from a previous
IRTC entry.
The two fish are from http://www.toucan.co.jp/product/3ds/aquarium/ and were
converted using Crossroads and then Poseray.

I would like to thank the users of news.povray.org for their helpful suggestions
whilst making this image.

That's all and good luck everyone!