TITLE: Icarus
NAME: Hugh Lim
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: hue@earthlink.net
WEBPAGE: coming soon!
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: icarus1.jpg
ZIPFILE: icarus1.zip
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray.68k.NoFPU v3.0
TOOLS USED: GraphicsConverter(for tga-jpg, the Sig)

RENDER TIME: approx. 5 days or 15 min(depending on the computer)

HARDWARE USED: Macintosh '030/25MHz & 143MHz Ultra Sparc(Sun Workstation) for
the final render, courtesy of Bill Marrs(Thank You Very Much!)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is a picture of Icarus, the son of Daedulus, very famous inventor in Greek

mythology.  Basically, Icarus was too close to the sun when he was flying with

Daedulus' invention, and it caused his death.  I originally wanted to place

Daedulus flying with Icarus, couple of boats, and some clothing for the human

figures, but didn't have time to place them all.  Oh well...




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

My main goal was to use POV-Ray only to render organic object as well as some

realistic textures(i.e. ocean, grass).

'Sky'

Just a big sphere with two bozo textures(one with white clouds and the
other with

slightly gray).

'Human Figure'

I approximated how long all the body parts were relative to each other and
tried

to shape them using spheres and cones, then I removed some unnecessary object

such as one that didn't show up when rendered.

'Sea'

I looked at a lot of pictures of oceans and realized that none of them had a

regular and defined ripples and that they reflected a lot of light causing
sharp

contrast, so I used 'bumps'(instead of 'ripples'), high 'brilliance'(for

contrast), and 'reflection' to simulate the effect.

'Land'

I used 'gradient' with various textures to draw the different stages(i.e.
water,

sand, mud, grass).  I placed water texture at the bottom to add realism to the

picture(irregular boundary between water and the sand instead of fixed boundary

when using 'plane' with 'height_field'). It looked awkward, though, when camera

was placed closed to where 'plane' and 'height_field' met.