EMAIL: scottgi_ms@msn.com
NAME: Scott A. Gish
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.0
TOOLS USED: blob and Trees
RENDER TIME: 10 min 51 sec
HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 64 MB
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Title: Irony sucks!

I started with a palm tree and was messing about with a desert island.  I came up with the idea of a crash landed escape pod.  You escape some disaster only to land on a desert island.  To make matters worse you get hit by a falling coconut.  I can't take credit for the split open coconut.  My wife added that touch.  Humor and ray tracing, a deadly combination.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I started with a palm tree from Phil Drinkwater's Tree utility.  I must play with this tool more.  Next came the ocean.  The ocean is a turbulent radial color map.  I created it several years ago for another ocean image crashing into a sea wall.  I scaled it up to give the appearance of water depth around the island.  There is a great deal of green in the color map but that part is off camera to the right.  The sky is a modified version of the one of the demo skies released with POVRay.  I forget which one, sorry.

The island is several large spheres.  The water is partly transparent so you can see the bottom through the water around the island.  Given more time I would have added some waves or foam surrounding the island.  Maybe some other time.  The texture of the island is a fairly simple crackle.  I just randomly picked some brown colors and scale it to suit me.

The mound dug up by the escape pod is a series of overlapping toruses.  I varied their angle of rotation to form the hump.  I should have made the torus radii different for each layer to give it a more random look.  I dug out the trench with a cone.  This allowed the water to fill the trench as well.

The pod is a hollowed out cylinder.  It has a sphere buried under the sand and a cone at the other end.  The interior has a light source and some simple components to give some depth.  I used two layered textured on the pod.  The bottom texture is a base yellow/gray brick pattern. The top texture is a gray, white and black color map with lots of transparency.  This gives a fairly good burned and charred look.  I was looking for something similar to the what the space shuttle looks like after landing.  I scaled them along the pod's length to give them a burn direction. The hatch is just cut from the pod object and placed on the island.  The railings and other things on the outside of the pod are fairly simple.  Love that #while command.  The only modification was the bending back of the rear railing and one of the hand rails.  I used a Chome_Metal texture.

The body was initially created using Blob Sculptor for Windows written by Ronald Praver.  I created the basic shape of the body.  I converted the component objects into spheres and added the pigments to the various body parts. I also added a belt, pouch and back pack.

As with every image I have ever created I could spend coutless days refining it.  Thanks to an October 31 deadline I can call it done.