TITLE: Exodus NAME: Philip Chan COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: p_chan@shaw.ca WEBPAGE: www.ucalgary.ca/~phichan/index.html TOPIC: Future COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pc_exds.jpg ZIPFILE: pc_exds.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 (Windows) TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop LE 5.0 RENDER TIME: 6s parse, 17m 7s trace, 17m 13s total HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2400+ XP, 256 Mb DDR RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Inspired by some of the images in the Decay round, this image depicts a future where Earth's resources have been depleted, and the planet has become polluted. Three ships are seen departing in search of "greener pastures" and a better future. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Brightness should be set so the bottom half or so of Earth is black. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image map for the earth is taken from the following site: Planet Portal http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/earth.html This image is created entirely within POV-Ray's built in text editor. Most of the objects in this image are created using Composite Solid Geometry (CSG) with primitives (spheres, cones, boxes, torii, cylinders, and planes). The two exceptions are the terrain (height field) and the plant (sphere_sweeps and lathes). The image also makes use of layered textures. A more detailed and technical description of individual components follows: Terrain: The terrain is a height field using an image generated by POV (using the height field tutorial as a base). The flattened out sections are created in terrain_hf.pov by placing cylinders above the plane with the "terrain" pigment. The colour of these cylinders represents the height of the terrain when exodus.pov is rendered. The cylinders use a pigment map which becomes transparent as it reaches the edges, to allow the plane to show through, which gives the smooth transition from rough to smooth sections in the final image. The plane also uses a pigment map in order to make the terrain slope upwards as you move away from the camera in the final image. This effect is amplified slightly by rotating the height field (and all objects on it) 5 degrees. The texture is a modified version of the one I used in my Decay entry. The modifications were mostly needed to deal with the increased anti-aliasing settings that were necessary in this image because of the details visible on the nearest garage. Rocks: The small rocks scattered about are placed at random positions. I initially tried using a difference to keep the road clear of rocks, but that took way too long to render. Instead, I created an object that acts as a "No Rock Zone." A random position is generated above the terrain, the trace function is first used with the No Rock Zone object. If it hits this object, a new position is generated, if not, the trace function is used with the height field to determine the position of the rock. Earth: The image was edited in Photoshop to create a "sickly" look before use. The colour balance was adjusted to man the oceans make the landmasses less green and the oceans less blue. In addition, the image was blurred in photoshop so that the landmasses wouldn't look so sharp in the render. A semi-transparent procedural texture on a larger sphere is use for clouds. Finally, scattering media is used to add a slight yellowish glow. Road Markers: Because of the sloped terrain, these are placed individually using the trace function. The reflective sections use a specular highlight with a high roughness value. Buildings: All CSG. Nothing too special here. The plants used the plant from my Decay entry. The buildings use layered texture with a metallic base and a fading texture (another technique from my Decay entry). Ships: Pretty much the same as the buildings, with slightly different textures. Stars: Starfield macro I created quite a while ago, with the bluish stars removed because I felt that it created a more melancholy look.