EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
NAME: Norbert Kern
TOPIC: Wordls Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: meadow
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: not yet
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray v3.5 beta 11
TOOLS USED: Hamapatch, Plantstudio,  Poser, 3DWin,  ObjUVPov,
	           Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 
parse 1 min 52 sec / trace 19 h 8 min (3072*1536; AA 0.3)
                                    peak memory 673 MB
HARDWARE USED: 1,4 GHz Athlon C / 1 GB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
When I was moving in my first own apartment, I create my first and 
only painting as an adult:
an underwater scene with two fishes swimming over a meadow with 
a tree, flowers, a butterfly and a ship hull.
My first concept on this round was a true to life underwater scene, 
but due to problems with creating partitions I lost nearly all of my yet 
unpublished work. After my despair faded away, I remembered my 
old drawing.
So my entry combines two well known worlds into a impossible scene 
or a world within a world.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This entry is a quick rush. I concentrated on creating a certain 
underwater mood through light and media.

Animals and diver are Poser figures
(http://www.renderosity.com and http://www.mitch3dseite.de/). 
Flowers and plants are made with Plantstudio
(http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/) or are from 
(http://www.toucan.co.jp).
The big tree is a "Maketree" (my best up to now; 
http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm), pine
is from Forester Arboretum 
(http://cgi.dartnall.force9.co.uk/cgi-bin/gallery.pl?index=2).
The grass ground is made with the "Fast Grass Include File" from
Rune Johansen (http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/3d/include/include.html).
Other things are modeled with Hamapatch 
(http://www.geocities.com/hamapatch/program/).

Water is a transparent box; photons are used as light. Atmosphere 
was created with a combination of absorbing media and fog (I know, 
real water is never as clear as in my image...).
Vegetation is planted with my own method described earlier
(http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2001-06-30/warm_up.txt).
For faster parsing I saved the coordinates, scale factors and angles 
of the 26800 plants (14 different ones). This number is rather low 
because the plants are set only at visible points.
For this a spotlight is set at the camera location and a orthographic 
camera is set above the heightfield. The seperate pov file is included
in the zip. 
A similar graphic collision detection worked, but the results were not 
used because I didn`t like the results and there were no time to 
improve them.
The texture of the fishes integrates an imagemap, normalmap,
reflectionmap and a transparentmap in a single image_pattern based
texture. The original "plastic" look of the fishes is improved by the
subsurface scattering code from Kari Kivisalo
(http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/18020/).
There was no possibility to get the light right at the flower / butterfly 
in the foreground. Therefore they are combined to a seperate 
light_group.
A big problem was the combination of transparent textures (fishes,
ground) with photons and media / fog. These parts had a shiny and
reflective finish. This ugly effect disappeared almost completely on
including an ior of 1.334 to the material definition (same as for the 
water).