EMAIL: limdaepl@gmx.de

NAME: Roman Reiner

TOPIC: Fire and Ice

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: firelake

COUNTRY: Germany

RENDERER USED: 
  
  POV-Ray v3.6.1


TOOLS USED: 

  POVTree for the trees,
  fast clouds macro by Gilles Tran for the sky,
  photoshop6 for conversion and adding author’s information,
  and my bare hands ;-)


RENDER TIME: 

  20 hours 30 minutes 1 second (73801 seconds)
  Render averaged 19.18 PPS over 960000 pixels

  plus approx. an hour for the background
  

HARDWARE USED: 

  Celeron 2.6 GHz, 640 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  The sunset is a thief -
  For she has stolen from the coral trees
  Their redness -
  Leaving them black-stained 
  That she 
  Might wash her gold in ruby.

                      -Billy McCarroll


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  
  Lake
  The lake is a plane with blurred reflection done as described in the
  questions and tips section: 
  http://tag.povray.org/povQandT/languageQandT.html#blurredreflection
  It is the part rendering slowest in the image.
  
  Sky
  For the sky I used the fastclouds macro by Gilles Tran. I found it
  quite difficult to worm a sunset sky out of it and I am still not 
  completely satisfied with the result. I had a long battle with myself 
  whether I should not just use an image background what would have been 
  much easier to set up and would have added much to the photorealism 
  of the image but on the other hand the image had suffered much from 
  a raytracing artists point of view and therefore I decided against
  doing it. As a compromise I rendered the background separately and 
  used it as wallpaper in the final rendering what speeded up the 
  rendering a lot.
  Well... In fact it just didn't slow it down even more ;-)
  
  Land
  The land is a heightfield based on the wrinkles pattern perturbed a
  little with granite pattern and additional granite normal. The snow
  texture is trial and error. I guess it will not be useable in other
  scenes and/or with different lighting.

  Ice floes
  The ice floes are mainly a copy of the first heightfield translated a
  little up and scaled down vertically so that they follow the coast.
  Later I perturbed their height with a additional bozo pattern to get
  some variation in their shape. the texture is the same snow texture
  as used for the land but with crackle instead of granite normal.
  This is layered with a vertical gradient pattern to get a smooth
  changeover to the water surface.

  Trees 
  For the trees I modified the POVTree's standard spruces shape to make
  it look more like a fir (more cone shaped) and layered the texture 
  with a semitransparent bozo pattern to simulate snow. Only one tree 
  is used but varied in size and orientation. I hope this is not too 
  obvious :-)
  The planting algorithm uses a bozo pigment function that provides a 
  threshold controlling whether a tree is planted or not. That results 
  in a more credible arrangement with more and less dense regions. See 
  source for more information.
  A total of 2000 trees had been planted in the scene.