EMAIL: mriser@datacomm.ch
NAME: Micha Riser
TOPIC: unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The cloud
COUNTRY: Switzerland
WEBPAGE: http://micha.virtualave.net
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 for LINUX, pvmpov 3.1
TOOLS USED: text editor, Gilles Tran's maketree include file
RENDER TIME: some days
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350, Pentium II 300, Pentium 166MMX
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Somewhere high in the air there is a place you would not believe it could 
exist: An outlandish palace standing on a cloud, even trees are growing out 
of the clouds. This place floating through the air flying over our heads
is a place of peace and quiet.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Everything is handcoded POV-Ray source code, everything done myself except
the two trees.

The scene is dominated by two basic shapes:
- The first is the bonnet of gold. It is the function 1+Sin(x) rotated around 
the x-axis. This shape formes the roof of the main palace, the windows and the 
doors, as well as the top of the walls and the fire bowls.
- The second shape is a tower which consists at its bottom of a square and at 
its top of a circle; in between there is a smooth morphing between these two 
shapes. All the towers and the columns are formed by this shape.

When I began creating this picture the first thing was to form these two 
shapes. Afterwards I made a macro which forms the surrounding walls and places 
its ornaments at the top. Then I began with the main building, the palace. I 
added thing for thing and cut out the windows. I spent some ours making the 
writing around the entry gate - which you can't read in the final version.

Then I made the clouds: This was quite annoying to me because it was my first
trial with POV's "medias". I spent much time to find suitable parameters for
the turbulence modifiers. I also had to realize that medias are very slow. 
The combination of many light sources, many objects and medias became finally
a reasonable problem. When I first started the final rendering I calulated 
that it would take about 1000 hours for the picture to finish rendering. So
I had to interrupt it and to look for a way to speed up rendering.

I finally solved this problem by adding some more boundings, decreasing the
number of light sources, and lowering the quality settings with the medias.
I would have liked to add some more clouds in the background, but this showed
impossible because this would have increased the rendering time even more.