EMAIL:  IsaiahDave@aol.com

NAME:  Isaiah Eyre

TOPIC: Water

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Old-Time Fishing Pond in the Rain.

COUNTRY: USA

WEBPAGE: 

RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5

TOOLS USED: Ray Dream Studio 5 for modelling, Paint Shop Pro 4 and 5 for textures, Terrain Forge for land.

RENDER TIME: ? (I forgot to time it! But it took an awful darn long time!)

HARDWARE USED: 486 DX2 66, 20MB RAM, 1MB video (>laughing<), 340MB HDD, 540MB HDD.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The sun has set, the clouds have rolled in, and it's raining at the old fishing pond. This image's quality was somewhat lost after I resized it..It still looks OK, though.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I started with the terrain, using Paint Shop Pro to create heightfields, and Terrain Forge to extrude them. I imported them into RDS and arranged them. For the water, I made a greyscale heightfield map of a bunch of white rings on a black background., This image was put into the bump channel on the water, and I added some reflection and some faint transparency. For the dock, 
I wanted each piece to look unique, so I modified each log to look uniquely different than the other. I put a bump map and a little bit of reflection on the logs to make them look like they were wet. For the grass, I extruded a group of tiny circles and bent them in different directions so they looked more natural.

I made a bucket to be floating in the water, if you can see it.. That's one of my favorite elements in the scene because it looks exacly how I wanted it to.

For the rain, I made a transparency map made up of a white background with light gray streaks for raindrops. I simply mapped the image over a cube in the transparency channel.

I really wanted to do more for this image.. I wanted to add some trees in the background, some softer grass back and around the terrain, but after I rendered the first sample, which took almost all day, I decided I didn't want to, especially since I'm using a dinky 66MHz CPU. 
I really could've done a better job, but the rules say no post-processing, so I had to keep it simple. (3-D graphics are REALLY HARD to work with on a 486.)
Anyway, that's it.