EMAIL: whhale@nvl.army.mil
NAME: Wil Hale
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Tourists
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.cal-busines.com/wil
RENDERER USED: MegaPOV
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro for Conversion, Spatch for Modeling, POVRay and Mega POV for Composition
RENDER TIME: 1 hr 28 mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 300 64 MB RAM and 4 Meg AGI card
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
In the early 1960s off the coast of Cypress what was once thought to be a great discovery
turned out the be a hoax.  While doing some recreational diving a group of students practicing
 a night dive saw a ship apparently removing artifacts from "A very signifigant find"
 After surfacing and contacting the authorities it was descovered that they were not removing 
the artifacts...they were putting them there.  This was done in an effort to boost the 
tourist business of a local dive company that offered underwater tours of "Ancient" ruins.

The crime was not that they were putting the artifacts in the water.  The real violation was 
that they were stealing them from an actual site, damaging them in transport and placing them 
at the "Find".

I do not know why no-one said anything about the fact that there were no organisms or growths 
attached to the centuries old stone work.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Height Fields!!!!

I used three for this image:
1   the sandy floor.  I created the image map to look like the small ripples of sand and set them
on an angle to add perspective.

2   The Rocks.  Made a flat plane in dark gray and textured it with a kind of a wide patterned
    crackle. this allowed the rocks to rise above the surface plane.  Image map of golds and 
    browns for layer variation

3   The Coral.  Again Dark gray but created light spots based on the location of  hills in the
    sandy floor.  Gave it a dark green and slate gray color map to simulate the slimey mold
    that grows in the warmer waters of the MED.

The Ship
Modeled entirely in sPatch and exported.  Used the basic primatives in sPatch and modified them
to fit the shapes I had in mind.  There are several layers and if interested e-mail me and i'll send the 
spt file.  I gave it a rusted texture.

The lights and Media:
OK.  I faked it.  I couldnt get the Media effect I was looking for with the Media option due to the scale
of the project and my own inexperience.  the lights are spotlights shaped like spheres and set into the canisters
on the hull of the ship.  The lights beams are transparent, hollow cones with media applied
on an Y gradient.  Now you know.

The water:
Just a plane with standard water texture.  Played around with the waves and the IOR setting
alot until i got it the way i wanted.

The moon:
Standard Point Light shaped like a sphere.  Distortion is caused by the IOR setting of the water

Columns and Vases:
Modeled in sPatch.  Textured with a pink marble texture modified to look more like alabaster

Fish:
modeled in sPatch.  repeated several times.

Oh Yes...Can't forget about the fog.  Just a standard fog.

This is my most abitious rendering to date and comprises a lot of new techniques for me.
It was very hard to decide on my trace.  To give you an idea of how much this has changed...
it started out as a lyceum and battle arena. :-)

I think all is in the zip file.  If something is missing let me know.
wil@cal-business.com