TITLE: The Lonely Buoy NAME: Daniel Nilsson COUNTRY: Sweden EMAIL: irtc@daniel-nilsson.com TOPIC: Out of Place COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: lifebuoy.jpg ZIPFILE: lifebuoy.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6.1 RENDER TIME: 43 minutes 28 seconds @ +W1600 +H800 +AM2 +A0.3 HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2GHz 512Mb IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I've been thinking of entering the IRTC for some time but have never had any good idea for an image. When I saw the topic I came up with the idea of a lifebuoy in a very dry desert. With no water for hundreds of miles the buoy must be really useless in this location and could not be more out of place. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First some credits: I used Jaime Vives Piqueres' Lightsys IV for lighting. The sky is made with the skylight include by Philippe Debar, modified by Ive for the use with Lightsys IV. The only light source is the sun and it's an area light with realistic size. Radiocity was used with Radiocity_OutdoorLight settings. The desert is an isosurface with a function that involves f_ridge_mf and f_noice3d. I sampled the sand color from a picture i found with google and used it as a simple pigment. I had to reverse gamma correct the sampled rgb values to make the desert show up with the intended color. The lifebuoy is a scaled torus. I used a bozo texture_map to blend a clean, somewhat shiny, red white checker texture and a dirty brown texture to make it look like it has been in the desert for some time. The ropes around the buoy are hand placed sphere_sweeps with a bozo pigment to make them look dirty and a quilted normal to make them look like ropes (not visible at the scale in the submitted image). The pole is a Round_Box_Union with T_Wood3 and a wood normal and the thing that holds the buoy is a CSG with a rather bad attempt at a cracked chrome material (luckely not visible at this scale).