EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au NAME: Chris Hernandez TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievments COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Reminder COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: none yet RENDERER USED: POV 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: Blob modeller, HFLab RENDER TIME: 7hrs 15mins HARDWARE USED: - 486DX2-80 clone (a.k.a. "the abacus") for writing scene - Toshiba 440CDT (P133MMX, 16MB) laptop for final render. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A submersible plunges through the depths to examine the wreck of the Titanic. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: When I looked at the topic, I thought about all of the great things that men and women have achieved throughout the years. Then I saw "Titanic". The movie itself sucked (here come the flames....) but it made me think. I'm sure that this round of the competition will be full of mankinds triumphs - but I wanted to remind everyone that there are also very tragic failures. So, here is "Reminder". It has 2 great engineering achievements; the unsinkable Titanic, and the submersible that is able to take us 2 miles under the sea to view her. The first thing I did was to model the actual ship. Since the movie just came out, I visited a lot of websites to try and get some reference photos for my model. No such luck. I was disappointed to find that there were really no detailed shots on the web. Finally, I found what I needed in the current issue of Cinefex (a special FX mag - makes for great reading!). Next I did the submersible. The actual body came pretty easily, but I spent a lot of time on the spotlights. In the photos I've seen, the spots used underwater have a very bright inner cone with a sudden drop to a faint outer cone. To get this effect I used 2 spotlights nested within each other. The next (and most frustrating part) was to try and get the right atmospheric effects. That far down underwater, there is no ambient light. So basically, I had to make everything fade to a bluish black, while at the same time trying to keep the picture from being too dark. This process was very long, I just couldnt find the balance that I was happy with. I'm still not fully satisfied - given more time I'd still definitley try to improve the effect. Coming closer to the deadline, I added a sea floor and some background mountains, both created with HFLab. I also used the random function to add the floating debris. I rusted up the ship using a library of rust blobs. I scaled and placed these on the rails and hull using the random function.