EMAIL: t.degroot@inter.nl.net
NAME: Thomas de Groot
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dire Passage
COUNTRY: Netherlands
WEBPAGE: none
RENDERER USED: MEGAPOV 1.1
TOOLS USED: Moray, POVtree
RENDER TIME: about 10 hours
HARDWARE USED: Compaq Presario 7000T - Pentium III 1GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
"The year of our Lord 1604. On June the 15th, a frightful storm hit our convoy of three ships sent by the VOC: the Unicorn, the Stingray, and the Bat, somewhere in the Southern Ocean. We were sundered from each other during the night and drifted for two days and two nights. At daybreak of the third day, we found ourselves near a vast archipelago of tiny isles and we feared that our companions had met a dreadful fate as we saw no sign of any other ship around us. Captain Mostaert decide - against our insistent prayers - to explore these unknown waterways. Soon we came across some wreckage afloat and to our dismay we observed the remains of a ship on the treacherous reefs, but we could not approach them for the shallows were full of hidden rocks. We do not know if it was the Unicorn or the Stingray, but of the third ship we found no trace."

             Johannes Isidorusz Kabeljauw, Log-book keeper on board VOC ship Bat


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
- The ship and the wrecked mast were built in Moray
- The torn flag was draped over the rocks with the Cloth Simulation utility
- The islands were made with my own Geomorph isosurface utility (see 
- The trees were made with Gena Obukhov's POVtree mesh utility
- The trees were distributed on the islands we the help of eval_pigment() and trace() functions
- The ocean surface is an isosurface based on Marc Jacquier's code. The correct rendering of foam is still under study. The present version is not entirely realistic.
-The final image was rendered in Megapov 1.1.

A number of things have not been solved yet. Foam was already mentioned; the texture of wet/dry cloth is another one for which I have not yet found a satisfying solution.