EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au
NAME:  Chris Hernandez
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievments
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Reminder
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: none yet
RENDERER USED: POV 3.02 for Windows
TOOLS USED: Blob modeller, HFLab
RENDER TIME: 7hrs 15mins

HARDWARE USED:

   - 486DX2-80 clone (a.k.a. "the abacus") for writing scene
   - Toshiba 440CDT (P133MMX, 16MB) laptop for final render.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

    A submersible plunges through the depths to examine the wreck
    of the Titanic.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

    When I looked at the topic, I thought about all of the great
    things that men and women have achieved throughout the years.
    Then I saw "Titanic". The movie itself sucked (here come the
    flames....) but it made me think. I'm sure that this round of
    the competition will be full of mankinds triumphs - but I
    wanted to remind everyone that there are also very tragic
    failures.
    
    So, here is "Reminder". It has 2 great engineering achievements;
    the unsinkable Titanic, and the submersible that is able to
    take us 2 miles under the sea to view her.

    The first thing I did was to model the actual ship. Since the
    movie just came out, I visited a lot of websites to try and
    get some reference photos for my model. No such luck. I was
    disappointed to find that there were really no detailed shots
    on the web. Finally, I found what I needed in the current
    issue of Cinefex (a special FX mag - makes for great reading!).

    Next I did the submersible. The actual body came pretty easily,
    but I spent a lot of time on the spotlights. In the photos I've
    seen, the spots used underwater have a very bright inner cone
    with a sudden drop to a faint outer cone. To get this effect I
    used 2 spotlights nested within each other.
    
    The next (and most frustrating part) was to try and get the
    right atmospheric effects. That far down underwater, there is
    no ambient light. So basically, I had to make everything fade
    to a bluish black, while at the same time trying to keep the
    picture from being too dark. This process was very long, I
    just couldnt find the balance that I was happy with. I'm still
    not fully satisfied - given more time I'd still definitley try
    to improve the effect.
    
    Coming closer to the deadline, I added a sea floor and some
    background mountains, both created with HFLab. I also used the
    random function to add the floating debris. I rusted up the ship
    using a library of rust blobs. I scaled and placed these on the
    rails and hull using the random function.