EMAIL:          sroberts@learn.senecac.on.ca
NAME:          Sonya Roberts
TOPIC:          Summer
COPYRIGHT:         I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
RENDERER USED:         POVRay 3.0 DOS (Final)
TOOLS USED:         Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to create image maps and height fields.
          Windows "Notepad" for writing of scripts and batches.
          My brain, with occasional assistance from pen and paper, to
          layout and plan objects.
RENDER TIME:         1 hour, 6 minutes, and 18 seconds to render 4,928 objects
HARDWARE USED:         486DX with 15,360K ext, 1024 ems, and 1024 xms
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:        Fishing from the fish's point of view.  Why?  'Cause
when I
          think of "SUMMER", I think of how I go north for a week each
          summer to go fishing with my Dad.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The first major challenge in creating this image was that I wanted my "water"
to
correctly refract light and distort objects above it's surface.  "WAVE" and
"RIPPLE"
textures just can't seem to manage that, probably because they're an optical
illusion
and not really a change in surface shape.  I also wanted a fairly random wave
pattern.
I created a height field using Photoshop; I started out by rendering clouds,
then
applied successive layers of filters such as ripple, crystallize, zig-zag,
gaussian
blur, etc., until I achieved an image map that rendered properly. One slight
dissapointment was that I was unable to achieve that "net of light" effect that
true
waves create underwater from the waves and ripples acting like lenses to
focus/diffuse
the light.  I suspect this is because of the way POV traces rays, and basically
is not
currently do-able.

In creating this image I also got around to learning the "WHILE" command, and
used it in
combination with RAND() to create:
   -        The weeds on the lake bottom, which are of random sizes, and have
their leaves
        at random angles from the "x" direction.
   -        The big fish (pickerel) are positioned at random heights and
positions, are of
        random sizes, and face random directions.
   -        The tiny fish (yellow perch) are swimming in a school.  They are all
the same
        size, but are at random positions within a range, and the further they
are
        towards the front of the school, the more they are rotated in the -y
direction both
        in their personal orientation and from the initial direction of the rear
of the
        school.

The label on the pop cans, the lettering on the sign, the fish scale texture,
and the
pigment map for the tree shadows were all also created using Photoshop 3.0
(with
occasional work in CorelDraw).


No post-processing was done on this image other than to change it from TGA to
JPG format;
even the "signature" in the lower-left corner of the image is a rendered
object.