EMAIL: darwallace@earthlink.net
NAME: David A.R. Wallace
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Pool of Tears
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (for JPEG conversion)
RENDER TIME: 02:00:40
HARDWARE USED: AMD Duron 800, 512 MB DDR RAM.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

In the middle of a vast desert, pock-marked with a huge crater, a
volcano rises in the center.  While in the throes of an immense
eruption, the volcano ignores a pool glistening in an extinct mountain
side tube.  This pool was not formed by rain or an underground geyser,
but by tears which can never fade even in the harshest sun.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is a much simpler image than I have attempted of late.  It is made
of the following components:

1. Land.  Since isosurface landscapes were proving unreasonably slow to
produce, I tried an image-based height field.  Creating one in POV-Ray was
not very hard, but the resolution had to be very high to get good results.
The answer was a custom terrain.ini for huge, simple images for use as
height fields.  Getting a good texture involved a combination of turbulent
image maps and a gradient texture map.  I learned this trick during my
aborted Fortress attempt.  The result is not only good-looking but fast
and I will seek even more detail in future.

2. Boulders.  Once I had the terrain I could use the trace function to
place objects on it.  The boulders are agate-displaced isosurfaces but
since they are individually small they don't disrupt the render the way a
landscape might.  They were placed in an include file generated by a
macro.  I set a maximum location height since these things were not likely
to rest on the slopes.

3. Lava.  I made the lava objects using a macro-based simulation which
took drag and viscous stretching into account.  The time to create the
include file was extensive (13 hours for the current spray, 10,000 
particles) but the resulting file had little impact on the parsing
time (33 seconds, total).

4. Smoke.  I think I found something big here.  A very faint scattering
media combined with a displacement isosurface to break up the outline of
the cloud is a very potent combination that will be used again.  It was 
also the slowest of the elements by a wide margin.

5. Pool.  The object itself (an isosurface with a fresnel reflection and 
light absorption media) was a lot simpler than its placement.  Landscape
height fields cannot really be made to order very well; you have to make
good use of the result.  The same goes for the camera.

6. Skull.  I just grabbed the object and its texture from my Cemetary
project.  It adds nicely to the sense of utter desolation and isolation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The POV Team for their excellent, and free, raytracing program.
The Absolute Background Textures Archive for image-maps.
The French 3dtextures.fr.st site for large, detailed image-maps.