EMAIL : MWAREMAN@ADMIN.OLDSCOLLEGE.AB.CA
NAME : Michael Wareman 
TOPIC : Flight
COPYRIGHT : I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE : Soaring
COUNTRY : Canada
WEBPAGE : Do not have one
RENDERER USED : Povray 3.0 for DOS
TOOLS USED : Fractint 19.2, Midnight Modeller 2.0a, Lparser 4.0, Neopaint, 
             Paintshop Pro, Universe 1.0, Wcvt2pov.exe
RENDER TIME : 1 hour 20 minutes
HARDWARE USED : 486 100Mhz, 16 Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION : I thought of doing something showing animals flying.
                    Thus, soaring birds/reptiles came into being.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This time around I found that doing this image was much like writting an 
essay: it develops as I work on it.  At first I didn't know exactly what I 
wanted to do.  Something with flying birds.  I used Midnight Modeller 2.0 to
create the preached and soaring birds/reptiles you see in the image.  Once
that was done I wanted them to soar over an alien landscape with one large,
prominent rock where one of the birds would be looking like he just landed 
or is just ready to take off.  The small land form is plasma fractal created 
using Fractint.  The larger land I created using Neopaint & Paintshop Pro.  I
am not totally happy with how it turned out but after many, many hours of 
trying I had to settle for what I did manage to create.  After many trial 
runs I had the two land forms scaled and translated the way I thought looked
best.  Then I thought for effect I would add water.  This at first turned 
out to be more difficult than I thought.  Due to the angle of the camera, and
some sort of need to have a horizon, using a plane just didn't work.  Then I
remembered something about using a sphere to model an earth moon effect.  So
I created a large sphere and adjusted its size and placement so that I had 
water showing in the foreground but still had a horizon.  A second 
height_field was used to create the clouds that are seen in the distance.
This too, took some trial an error to get so that the clouds where off in
the background and didn't obscure the landscape below too much.

While surfacing the Internet I found a shareware program for creating 
beautiful interstellar scenes.  Only problem is that I needed a Windows 95
machine, that took some doing but as you can see I managed.  Along with the 
nebula I wanted a moon in my scene.  This also caused some problems.  Mainly,
it cast a shadow on my background.  This was solved bu moving the background
far enough back so that the shadow is actually below the horizon.  The 
texture for the moon is a modified wood texture.  I had thought about giving 
the moon rings but maybe later.  I find that after 3 or 4 weeks of working on
an image I want to try something else.  I also thought that the rings might
detract from the true importance components of the image.

I liked the dolphin in the picture.  I was to show another form of flight.
The dolphin was orignally part of a set of three.  I used WCVT2POV to convert
the dolphins from DXF format to RAW.  Then I used Midnight Modeller to 
extract the three dolphins into separate parts.  Placing and sizing the 
dolphin took some trial and error, as did most things in this work!

The trees were created using Lparser.  I modified one of the tree forms so
that Lparser would create a branching form with no leaves.  Having the output
as blobs added a surrealistic effect to the trees.  Again, what I wanted and
what I got are two different things.  I wanted a more gnarled, sinister 
looking trees.  But, again after much trial and error I did not managed to
get that.

I had a spaceship in the picture but decided to leave it out as it didn't
seem to fit with what else was happening with the image.

I have included all the files I used to create the image in the SOARING.ZIP
file.  If anyone has any ideas on how to acheive some of the effects that I
was after, or just plain want to discuss the image further please email me.

CyberMike