TITLE: Oasis NAME: David A.R. Wallace COUNTRY: U.S.A. EMAIL: darwallace@earthlink.net TOPIC: Desert COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: oasis.jpg ZIPFILE: oasis.zip RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 1.0 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (JPEG conversion), Crossroads (object conversion) RENDER TIME: 18h 41m 27s HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2000, 1024 MB RAM, Win2K Pro SP4. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A sparse oasis in the middle of the desert, isolated from the outside world. It attracts a fair amount of wildlife, mostly insects. A coral snake hunts the few mice that live here. It's not a particulary welcoming place to humans, though, with the scorpions and sand storms. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was the first time that I really had to put free 3dcafe models to work, especially the skull. The ants, scorpions, and skull were converted using Crossroads. The height field was a 16-bit greyscale image created using POV. I made two new INI files with gigantic image sizes just for this purpose. One of them uses normal screen aspect ratios and the other one uses squares. The latter was used in this image. The water is simply a hollow plane with a media interior and rippled normals. I would have used a heightfield or even a parametric surface for larger bodies of water that experience more chop. Oasis ponds are usually rather placid by comparison. The dust storms are built programatically using a simple tetrahedral mesh. Each storm has 240,000 particles. I tried to have all of the triangles in the storm in one mesh but my computer choked on it. Everything else in this image was built using parametric surfaces. I actually had to apply a new wrinkle using the trace function to "glue" a creature to a height field. That trick was only needed in the object include files--the generator itself only needed debugging. The trees (trunk, stem, leaf), grass, snake, and mice are parametric. The mice had some CSG but the rest were all meshes. I made a simple adjustment to the tree builder after seeing a palm tree from an earlier contest. The mice are by far the most involved creatures, using 7 surfaces of three types (body, leg, and ear) and CSG feet. This creature was inspired by a beautiful Poser mouse I found. You may see Poser figures in my future work if the topic calls for it. The big technical breaththrough is the use of macros to place points and objects on a heightfield and their combination with my parametric generator. The radiosity I used required some tweaking to the lighting to get right. What was sand prior to radiosity looked like snow with it the first time around. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The POV Team for their excellent, and free, raytracing program. The MegaPOV community for the patches and tweaks in the MegaPOV compiliaton. 3dcafe.com for their free models. J. Trout (http://www.surfline.ne.jp/trout/) for the mouse inspiration. Absolute Background Texture Archive for the sky texture.