EMAIL: emediez@tripod.net
NAME: Marjorie Diez de Graterol
TOPIC:  Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. 
TITLE: mg_ababa
COUNTRY: Venezuela
WEBPAGE: http://members.tripod.com/~emediez
RENDERER USED:  POVRay v. 3.0
TOOLS USED: POVRay 3.0
RENDER TIME: 09 minutes 23 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium  166 MHz, 48 RAM 4.0 GB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The place where Ali Baba hides at night, inside the cave.
Reading my own image description I found it so simple! But it wasn't. I'd like to summarize what I've learned:
a- Working with every piece of the image requires work and some headaches.I've tried and rendered more than 150 images. Testing here and there, checking help and documentation files, -and traslating them. 
b- At first, I tried to alleviate the work and downloaded some modellers, but I found POVray better in quality; besides, all modellers are easier to understand if you know something about POVray. 
c- All the files that come with POV, as demos and scenes are invaluable helpers.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
1) I created the surface of revolution first. Since this is one of the concepts in POV that I understand a little more than the others, I began to experiment with that. 
2) Then, I worked with the height field, using a .gif file. The same .gif file is used in the plane that intends to be the ceiling of the cave, here it is a bump_map. NOTE: The .gif file was made with PaintShopPro, and More Blur was applied 
3) I added some more surfaces of revolution, placed them and then changed textures. 
4) Last, (but no least) I added some light sources to give some "atmosphere" . 
5) Rendered the image (in POVray, size: 1.5 Mb as tga) and compressed with Corel 8.0, at 25% of compression and no smoothing.
6) Here it is.