EMAIL: paulinos@adinet.com.uy
NAME: Ignacio Ramirez Paulino
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Kilawea Iki 
COUNTRY:Uruguay
WEBPAGE: none
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01 for Windows
TOOLS USED: Terrain Maker, Moray 3.01 for Windows
RENDER TIME: 0 hours, 43 minutes, 47 seconds
HARDWARE USED:Pentium 150MHz, 24Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a view from the Kilawea Iki volcano. The Kilawea Iki is located in Hawaii and has a constant "smooth" eruption that can be watched from close. The main lobe can reach 300 meters in height.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This scene contanins relatively few objects in it.
Basically, the shape of the volcano and its crater is a height field wich I created using the great "Terrain Maker". lowering, raising and applying erosion to get the correct shape. In fact, there is no real volcano in the scene. The height field only makes the crater, the river and its surrowndings (check out the gif used to create the height field).
The complexity of the scene lies in the use of the HALOS. Each halo is contained in ellipses wich in turn form the flames and the scattered dust around the crater. Actually, there are four different halos defined. Three for the three different intensities of flame, and one for the red hot dust. The most difficult stage in the creation of this scene was the fine-tuning of the halo parameters in order to obtain the desired effect. Some secondary effects arised from the fact that PovRay cannot handle superimposed halos very well (overlapping objects, each one containing its own halo) , and the multiple halos (one object with more than one halo inside) are limited to one colour map for all the halos, wich made it useless for my purposes.
The light from each of the flames is simulated by area lights scaled and colored according to the size and color of each flame. There is no sun, so all the light in this scene comes from the flames.
The Lava river is made from a layered texture called "magma" wich consists of red-hot veins (onion pattern) on top of "cold" lava (not really very cold).
Finally the sky is also a layered texture wich tries to emulate the sky right after the sun has gone down. Its a bozo pattern on top of a gradient pigment pattern.

NOTE : Unfortunately, the high contrast that characterizes this scene doesnït suit well the JPG standard and the Lava veins in the river got some color distortion on its edges, in the form of very thin white contours.