TITLE: The Spectator NAME: Moussa Chehade COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: darkfire_m89@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Desert COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: specirtc.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows v3.6 TOOLS USED: Moray, Terragen, World Machine, Wings 3d, Adobe Photoshop RENDER TIME: 1h 53min 21s HARDWARE USED: P4 2.0 Ghz 512MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The "Story" As the sunset sun cast his golden rays over the desert sand, a lone snake wound its way over a sand dune. This particular snake had crossed countless others in search of its burrow, and there were many more to cross before the day was done. The snake paused for a while, and looked out over the desert scene. Sand. Vast stretches of sand, and little more. Yet, the snake continued to survey the area, although it had definitely seen this same sight hundreds of times before. A strange presence was in the area, something very subtle, but definitely new. Off in the distance, two jeeps made their way over the desert dunes. They slowly drew closer, clambering over the dunes that filled the landscape. Yet, the snake still stood there, watching the two. The snake did not care that, in a few moments, the two jeeps would soon be driving off into the distance, that the desert sun set lower and lower with each passing moment. That, with night having fallen, the snake would have to make its way to its home, avoiding the nocturnal predators night brings with it. All it knew was that the two jeeps were a welcome change to the empty desert scene, yes, quite a welcome change indeed... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: To start it all off, i began with a series of drawings, quite a few drawings, until i finally settled with one that was not too different from the picture you see here. I find it much easier to work from drawings, especially when modelling. The "story" above gives the idea the image was generated around. I apologize for not providing any source code, the file is MUCH too large, so i attempt to explain everything here. The actual work started in Terragen, where i experimented with many different atmoshperic and cloud settings until i came up with the background in the picture. For those of you who are curious, the atmospheric settings are: Simple Haze (30 0ensity, 1360 m half-height, colour 128, 123, 98) Atmospheric Blue (10 0ensity, 1924 m half-height, colour 166, 39, 30) Light Decay (40 0ecay, 1746 m half-height, colour 233, 108, 23) As for the clouds: 25 0arkening, Sky size 20096, Altitude 1920m, Depth 4, Density Contrast 62 I then set cloud shading and atmosphere on high accuracy, and output a hi-res file to use as the background. Adobe Photoshop was used after to "adjust" the clouds and sky. After, I began work on the meshes in Wings 3d (i.e. snake, jeeps, grass). The snake was made by, first, extruding a cube to make it look like a "cross-section" of the snake, then extruding this shape along a curved path (actually extruding it a bit then rotating rather repeatedly). The jeeps took quite a bit of effort, they are actually very high resolution models. I found a large number of photos for reference and a low-res jeep model as the basic framework (can't remember where I found it). I ended up deleting half the jeep and replacing it with parts I box-modelled, though. The tires are made by extruding the sides of a cylinder to made the basic tire shape, subdividing it, selecting the faces which should be treads, extruding them along their separate normals, then selecting the edge loops between the treads, and rotating those, forming a tread pattern. The wheel covers were modelled from a cylinder I "hollowed" out, then extruded and joined some of the faces at the center. To make holes in the covers, I had to inset some of the faces and intrude them. The grass started from a cube, which was then extruded to make a blade shape, I duplicated this blade, rotated the duplicate, grouped the two blades, duplicated them, and so on. Some of the blade groups were scaled along the Y-axis to make the grass look more organic, and in the end, I slightly crumpled the vertices to add to the organic look. The dunes are heightfields generated in World Machine (thanks to Fil and Ralph for their Dune macro) by first using ridged perlin (very low persistence) for the distortion map, then using the dune macro to create the dunes. I later had to apply smoothing and cubic midlands in the height transformation filter to get a more realistic dune shape. The mountain in the background was also generated in World Machine The next chunk of work was assembling everything in Moray. The background was UV mapped to a large box, which had to be scaled to match the aspect ratio of the image. Meshes were imported, and it turned out they needed some subdivision to get a smoother look. The heightfields were then generated, and I made the near hill (where the snake is resting) first from a bezier patch (which was then converted to mesh due to artifacts). Next came the time for light, textures, and such. The main light is a point light with fade power set to 0, positioned so that it matches the sun in the background (I believe a parallel light source would have better served this purpose). I made use of an area light to soften the lighting of the foreground, and to bring out some of the scales on the snake. The snake texture makes use of the quilted pattern for the pigment and the normal. A slightly reflective finish is used to bring out the scales and to create the highlights on the snake. The metallic paint on the jeeps took a bit of tweaking, and if you're interested, here is the finish: Ambient: 0.1, Diffuse: 0.6, Brilliance: 1.0, Phong: 0, Phong Size: 40.0, Specular: 0.374, Roughness: 0.05, Reflection: min 0.215, max 0.843, Fresnel: falloff 1.0, exponent 1.0, metallic 1.0 The sand in the foreground uses a solid colour for the pigment, but uses an average of granite (scaled to 0.01, and bozo (scaled non-uniformly to create the "ripples"). The dust in the distant background is just ground fog, however, the dust around the dunes is a scattering media, which proved to be effective (note the shadows cast into the media). The dust trail behind the red jeep is a combination of a scattering media and absorbing media, with the density pattern being boxed, which was then scaled, and then turbulence was applied. Radiosity was used in the scene, with a brightness of 1.2, count 100, gray threshold of 0.8. In my opinion, radiosity was one of the more important features used. The whole scene takes on an orange hue, due to the colour of the background, and radiosity. Also, the glowing headlamps of the jeeps are due to radiosity. There are no lights there, as they caused problems in test renders.