EMAIL:  spanky@wpi.edu
NAME: John D. Stevens
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE: A Foreshadowing of Tomorrow
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: Shards of Light(http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky)
RENDERER USED:  Povray3.1
TOOLS USED: HF-Lab
RENDER TIME: 31h 37m 15s
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6 233 w/48mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:  

The final stages of a massive world wide volcanic meltdown
are taking place in this image.  Great floods and pyroclastic
flows have devastated a major portion of the world.  This image
takes place in the Great Northwest of America, somewhere near
the Cascade mountain range.  A small hunters cabin rots away on
a slender piece of land vaulted high above the flood plain.

Life hangs precariously on the edge of salvation and destruction,
represented by the questionable grip of the forest on the last 
vestiges of land.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:  

Let me just preface the rest of my comments with this "Media is
too damn slow".  I don't really mind if final rendering takes
a few days, it's in the test renders that I really get annoyed
with the time it takes.

I started off by creating the volcano.  This was designed to be
the centerpiece of my image, and had the most work put into it,
especially the volcanic ash plume.  You can view the development 
of my ash plume by checking out these images:

http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest1.jpg
http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest2.jpg
http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest3.jpg
http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest4.jpg
http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/plume.jpg

It took me a greater part of February to get the plume to look
even close to where I wanted it.  

After development of the ash plume, I started work on the 
foreground, which I initially wanted to do with height fields.
However, the more work I put into it using height fields, the
less satisfied I became.  Therefore I made a risky decision.  I
decided to use blobs to model my foreground terrain instead.  
Initially I only used blobs to create the middle pinnacle, which
I am very satisfied with, but since the competition deadline
was quickly approaching, and my height fields on the right and
left looked horrible, I decided to use blobs for them instead
as well.  The left side cliffs are all blobs, as well as the
right side mushroom caps and support stems.  I had to hand
code all of this stuff, so it was extremely tedious.

The boulders in the scene were also blobs, and textured using
a layering effect.

The trees were created using upside down cones combined in layers
of increasing size as you get closer to the bottom of the tree.
Basically, to get the pine look, you create a semi-transparent 
image map to paste onto the cones.  You can get many effects this 
way, and in addition, it renders alot faster.

The ocean is simply a complicated texture, and with a two layered 
fog over it, makes for a nice effect.  The lens flare for the sun
was a modified version of "sun3" from Chris Colefax's lens flare
package.

I am still not satisfied with the following scene elements:

1) The grass on the pinnacles
2) Some of the layout of the foreground could be better
3) I'm sure there is a better camera angle in this scene

Anyways, some of the include files in this scene are very large, so
I couldn't fit them on my only 1.44mb disk.  Please email me if you 
want those files, and I'll see if I can get my roommate to lend
me his zip drive.

Regards
John