EMAIL: gpig@prometheus.hol.gr
NAME: George Papaioannou
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: povray 3.0beta for DOS
TOOLS USED: Photoshop 3.0, 3DStudio 3.0 and 3DS2POV utility
RENDER TIME: 3 hours 8 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-150 / 16MB ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The image is a view of an underwater alien base and the creatures,
the "sea amazons" it belongs to. There are many details in the scene
such as the bubbling water above the two large funnels and the school
of fish. I am a firm believer that even details that do not play a
significant role in the scene, help enhance the credibility of the
final image.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Environment:
To begin with, the bedrock is a height field derived from a map
created with Photoshop. The sand is a blend of ripples and bumps using the
"bozo" statement for the creation of the sea-weeds. Both layered and simple
fog were added to simulate turbulent dust near the sea bed and depth cueing.
I didn't use radiosity because in such a dark scene it wouldn't be very
helpful. I had in mind using the "atmosphere" statement but it is such a
computationally expensive method that would take an incredible amount of
time for this scene to be rendered.
I am really frustrated about the brightness of the rendered image because
I used three different programs for viewing the file and each one had a
different gamma response curve. So, it might look a little dark or with low
contrast, depending on the image viewing utility.


Buildings:
For this purpose I used objects entirely created with povray and relied
heavily on complex and nested CSG. I have used some parts in povray 2.0
scenes as well, so I only had to expand the main include file I used.
The majority of the lights seen in the picture are not real light sources.
Instead, I used halos to achieve a more hazy effect where needed and simple
colour maps with "finish { diffuse 0 ambient 1 }" statements under partially
transparent textures. Apart from the height field map, the only other image
map that I used ( and created ) is that used for the complex lighting effect
in the tunnels ( red lights ) and the surface bellow the main structures
( white lights ). The "brick" pigment and normal type came in handy when I
tried to describe the various iron-plated constructions.


The amazons:
These naked girls were created with 3DStudio and then converted to a povray
include file using 3ds2pov utility ( as were the fish meshes too ). Textures
were then added directly to the include file. It took me a lot of time to
prepare the final mesh, as human anatomy is not my favorite subject. Anyway,
I hope It's pretty convincing.

Effects:
The scattering on floating particles in front of the submarine spot lights
consists of an emitting halo with spherical mapping placed on the edge of a
cone. Thus, it looks as if light attenuates because of scattering.
There are caustics in the scene, caused by a light source high above the
visible area and a thin infinite layer of water bellow the light. It seems
though that the light pattern the effect casts on the objects is very subtle,
especially when compared to the vivid textures of the objects themselves.
The bubble columns are simple emitting halos with cylindrical mapping but
with the "samples" value turned down to 3.

Files:
I decided not to make a zip file with the include and main files because It
took me a lot of precious time to make them and some include files are always
under constant refinement and expansion ( Some building parts have even
screws on them ! ). After all, the include file for the sea amazon mesh is
about 1.4M large ! All objects in this scene were created by me, so, no
acknowledgments are needed.