EMAIL:Varyk@aol.com
NAME:Neal M.Hicks
TOPIC:Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Berg
COUNTRY:USA
WEBPAGE:(none)
RENDERER USED:POV-Ray 3.1a
TOOLS USED:LView 31
RENDER TIME:13m 53s 
HARDWARE USED:Pentium II 400Mhz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  With Water the subject and Winter coming on, I decided to have lots
of water in different states.  Hence, icebergs on the water in fog
under overcast skies.  Just about everything in the scene is water,
except for the seaweed.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  I just got POV-Ray, and have been wading through the tutorials and
help files for some time, working examples.  This is my first origional
scene, with no rendering experience except through learning POV-Ray.

  Making this scene was a tutorial all its own.  Every object required
me to learn how a process worked or a technique was applied.  I drew
heavily on examples as templates, but by the time the scene was done,
every object was origional.

  I started with just a simple camera, a lightsource high up, and a
cylinder 'floating' in a transparent blue plane.  I knew icebergs tend
to melt more around their waterline in calm waters, and after many
permutations of spheres on cones with subtracted torii around the
middle, I decided to learn more about lathe objects, gave it a good
bulk under the waterline, and used a plane to chop a piece off the back
at an angle to make it asymmetrical.  I was reconciled to it being
smooth, polished from wind and rain.

  The texture 'Mottled' came from a desire to give it a realistic look.
iceberg ice is bluish due to air and minerals frozen into it, and the
melting surface would look white in places.  I used a bozo texture map
to pull them together.  I strected and rotated the combined texture to
make it look like the ice formed in layers in some glacier, and had
formed at an angle to its current floating position.  The transparency
of the Blue_Ice texture allowed some light to bounce around inside like
an icecube, while the bumps on Snow_Tex created both a wavy surface and
some artifacts on top of the berg rather suggestive of passing birds!

  I then searched in vain for some sort of water.inc on the cd-rom but
didn't find any, so I used glass.inc for T_Winebottle_Glass, a nice
green seawater color.  The ripples I added, centered on the berg,
showed me how the refractive properties of the glass textures worked
well for the underwater portion of the berg, adding visual interest.
to keep the sea from being too transparent, I added a black plane.  I
tried to use a black fog, but I couldn't make ground fog under y=0,
perhaps I could've raised all the elements and camera but the black
plane sufficed.     
  
  I added another lathe object, chopped, rotated, scaled and translated
to make an ice mountain in the background.  I added the texture between
two scalings because the texture needed to be larger to work at a
distance.  I added a fog to make the ice mountain appear distant, and
colored the ambient light an icy blue to chill the scene.  At first the
background statement seemed unnecessary, but its absence darkened my
glass ocean so I left it in.

  At the last minute I decided to layer in a seaweed texture on the
ocean, and this was one of the most challenging parts!  I adapted an
example of a granite color map for rust spots in the tutorial, changing
the colors, frequency and scale to make bits of seaweed strewn about.
When I layered the seaweed onto the glass, the refractive properties
disappeared, or at least the refraction in the ripples.  I tried
switching the order of the glass and seaweed, but I don't know enough
yet to figure this out, so I put the seaweed on another plane just
barely above the water.

  I was pretty happy with the scene when I converted it to a JPEG with
LView31.  I felt it had a sparse, Japanese-garden kind of feel, and was
very cold looking.