TITLE: Borealis
NAME: Daniel Corley
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dcorley@umr.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.umr.edu/~dcorley
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: boreali1.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows v3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    HF-Lab, PSP 4, pencil and paper

RENDER TIME: 
    3h 3m 32s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is a scene of a snowy, tree-filled valley leading up
to some steep Grand Teton-type mountains. The moon shines
down upon the valley as the Aurora Borealis silently traces
curtains of color above.

** Please note that this image was rendered with 
assumed_gamma set to 1.0. Some of my pre-screeners have 
complained about it being too dark, so you might need to 
turn up the brightness on your monitor a bit.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Here's how I did it:

* The base ground was created with a POV file.
* The background mountains were also created with POV.
* The trees were created by adding low-amplitude random 
  noise to the base ground height_field with HF-Lab.
* The trees growing on the flanks of the mountains were
  created in a similar fashion, except they required a 
  MUCH greater resolution height_field to get the detail 
  level desired. (2400x1200 in this case)
* The stars, fog, and moon were pretty basic.
* The clouds are done with attenuating halos with some 
  turbulence thrown in. (see the POV docs for that one)
* The aurora effects were a tad tricky. What I finally 
  came up with was a height_field made with a few wavy 
  lines and some noise added in. I then unioned one copy 
  of this height_field for the upper half, and a copy
  scaled by -1 in the y-axis for the lower half, then
  filled the resulting shape with a turbulated emitting 
  halo with a color_map consistent with photos of aurorae
  that I'd downloaded.

* Enjoy!

* PS - Can you tell I like height_fields? :)