EMAIL: gordon@mpgenius.com
NAME: Gordon Griesel
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: iwakuni.jpg
ZIPFILE: iwakuni.zip
TITLE: Iwakuni at Sunrise
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.mpgenius.com

RENDERER USED:
	Gordon's ray tracer written in C, which I developed after reading
	the book Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C, Watkins, Coy, Finlay, 1992.

TOOLS USED:
	TextPad editor
	Paintshop Pro
	pencil and paper

RENDER TIME: 02:44:23

HARDWARE USED: Pentium-III 850 laptop with 544MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	The Iwakuni Castle sits on a hillside backed by a bright morning sunrise.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
	This is my first entry in the IRTC... and I feel quite intimidated.

	The castle was created by hand while referring to photographs of various
	Japanese castles.  I travelled to Japan in 2000 and simply had a great time.
	Since I had personal photographs of the Iwakuni castle, it is the one I chose
	to model after.  Then I found a picture of a lantern and low and behold,
	I had a lantern.  All totaled, there are 164,943 objects in this image
	requiring about 37MB of memory.

	The tree was created using my own tree generator written in C.  Before I wrote
	it, I looked at Andrew Clinton's Spline-tree to get ideas.

	The terrain, although baren, was created using my own terrain generator which
	I developed after reading an article in Dr. Dobbs by Robert Krten, 1994.  It's
	done by generating faults over and over, then smoothing.  It will create lots
	of different looks, but some are very realistic mountain terrains.

	The bright glowing rays were generated by a function I wrote which might be
	similar to the POV Media function (POV code is hard to read).  In my function
	I look for atmospheric media in the air and trace it back to a light source.
	For a smooth look, I perform adaptive sub-rendering as I go.  It works pretty
	good.

	FYI, there is no gamma correction or any post processing done on this image.  Why,
	you might ask... okay, I'm stubborn.  I admit it.
	I created the JPG using source from the Independent JPEG Group's JPEG source
	code on their web site.

	I am going to try to include the source code for my image file, just so anyone
	interested can look at it.

	Thanks so much.

	-Gordon-