TITLE: Gateway to Wilderness
NAME: Brett Dickson
COUNTRY: New Zealand & Australia
EMAIL: brett.dickson@gmail.com
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bd_gway.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Fractint for Windows
            Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 10 minutes 46 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop (3.06 GHz Pentium 4)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The remote frozen wilderness of the Antarctic is as much a desert as the more
traditional sandy desert.  The scene is of an explorer setting out from a hut
into an uncharted wilderness.  

The hut is purely fictionally although based on the sort of building that may
have been used by early explorers.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The hut is based on CSG objects.  The doors and windows are created with a
macro to make each one unique.  This was done by translating the textures by a
random offset each time the macro was called.  The corrugated iron on the roof
of the hut was created from an isosurface using a sine function along the x
plan to create the corrugations.  

The crates alongside the hut are simple CSG objects, rotated and translated for
artistic effect.

The snow back is built from a single isosurface object, using third order 
polynomials to get the basic shape and the f_ridged_mf function to add noise to
the overall surface.

The smoke is based on an isosurface cone with added noise (in an attempt to 
mimic the way smoke twists around a breeze) then filled with a scattering 
media.

The mountains are a height field based on a Fractint plasma cloud.

The foot prints in the snow are a simple CSG object (mirrored to create a left
and right foot) then stamped into the plan the forms the foreground.

The silhouetted figure started as a digital photo of me.  It was then 
edited into a black and white negative that was placed in the scene as a 
height field.

Saved radiosity data was used to improve the render time and quality of the
final image.