EMAIL: dan-h@gmx.de
NAME: Daniel Hofmann
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The fountain and the fairytree
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: thunderspace.org
RENDERER USED: PoV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: AutoCad2000, CADPov, Poser3, PoseRay, SPatch
RENDER TIME: 5 days
HARDWARE USED: PII 350 MHz, 128 MB RAM + PIII 850 MHz, 256 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: somewhere at the end of the day, there is an endless running fountain, opposite to the last outpost of the fairy empire, the fairy tree tower, where guardias watch the river...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Fountain, boat and fairytree were created in AutoCad using primitives, rotation-objects and boolean geometrie (CSGs) - some structures were set as POV-Spheres, using CADPov and in Pov-Ray converted into splined, multipart Blobs (using a spline formula i "invented" in the middle 90ies for a music renderer in PowerBasic). 
Although i could have used PoV-CSGs too, there is no good way to do them with ACad+CADPoV in WYSIWYG and i love ACad, i also got the experience the created meshes render faster than "real" CSGs
Maybe this is not enough architecture in your eyes, decide yourself...
(Guess what my profession is... ... it's building services and environmental engineering ;-)
The Trees use that splined multipart Blobs too for the whole trunk, branches, roots - a little bit tricky, but i found out that blobs render faster than sphere-cone combinations using more than 50 stages.
Leaves i first wanted to do with transmaps at twice folded simple meshes, but PoV has some disadvantages in using atmosphere (media) there, one can see the invisible parts. 
So i did a painfull change to heightfields (with cut down waterlevel) which suits my needs so far, the only disadvantage is the stiff looking of the leaves.
Gras is done by a "simple" isosurface, the larger ones are procedural spline-patches.
The fairy is done in poser and converted with PoseRay, her cloth and the monk in the boat are done with sPatch.
Rendering was done in 1152x864 with true Media-sky, one lightsource (sun) and radiosity, without antialiasing.
Some Idea for the lucky ones, having 2 computers: i used a negativ sky camera vector at the second and setup to the whole image at both computers, so that it's ready when they meet, equal where they meet. The only disadvantage is the waste time of one radiosity pretrace (in my case 3 hours)

You may use my sources of course (cause i want to spread the word - it's PoV), but please let me know, if you have some good ideas for improving some things. I'm still trying to improve my skills... (The sources of the sources are available too, please let me know)

PS: the m_ is there for Modjo, i found some really exciting Modjo-World-Pix out there, and my long time aim is to do it better with PoV - a long way to go...

AND: I'm still searching for a poor fool rendering this to 4000x3000, any volonteers?