TITLE: The Isolator
NAME: Scott Boham
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: scottgboham@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: isolator.jpg
ZIPFILE: isolator.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    39 hours 16 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 3 GHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


POV-ray is really suited to creating repeated geometric structures, so
I thought reproducing this famous bridge would be an ideal souce.  The
power of the POV SDL means that it was very easy to make the bridge
look however I wanted once I had all the modelling done.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


It's all POV SDL, apart from the heightmap (and its associated imagemap).
I didn't include them in the source because they're pretty big files.

I first took the dimensions of the bridge from the official Golden Gate
Bridge website:

http://www.goldengatebridge.org/research/factsGGBDesign.html

I then found numerous photos of the bridge online to model all the
required detail.  The land was created by getting the height data
from http://seamless.usgs.gov/ and writing a small bit of code to
load in the geoTIFF files.

The water is a textured isosurface and the splash is a blob with lots
of spheres.  The sky is media contained by a difference of two spheres.