EMAIL: exet@club-internet.fr
NAME: Jean-Charles Marteau
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "What's that ?"
COUNTRY: France
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.5
TOOLS USED: GIMP
RENDER TIME: 1h46
HARDWARE USED: AMD XP 2600, 1Go RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
People from outer space come to visit us, and unfortunately they find this photo:
War is a mystery to them.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I used the Makegrass and Maketree macros from master Gilles Tran.
Becareful that I didn't use the grass very well so that it doesn't show how good is the macro.

- The visitors are made of blobs.
- The ground is pov generated height field with little stones scattered on it using trace and random positions. The stones are isosurfaces taken from the crumbles of one of povray's demo.
- The Flying saucer is made of a few CSGs, I made it quite reflexive on purpose so that it shows the environement well.
- I'm quite happy with my wall which is made of a single image-mapped height field generated by povray (source included). I did this wall after I had look at the walls Jaime Vives Piqueres did, I don't know how he does his, but I do mine with mathematic operations between pigment functions.
- I put a tree ouside of sight to make shadows on the scene. A sun colored area light softens these shadows according to the distance from the scene (tree's shadows are very scatered).
- I also added some sort of contrast enhancing fog (with a color of <1.2,1.2,1.2>) which I discovered recently.
- The image is rendered with radiosity