TITLE: Dolphin Pod
NAME: Daniel Roth
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: rotht@televar.com

TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: drdolph.jpg
ZIPFILE: drdolph.zip

RENDERER USED:
    POV-Ray for Windows v3.02

TOOLS USED:
    Moray for Windows v3.01
    PaintShopPro v4.14 (for teeth heightfield and JPG conversion)

RENDER TIME:
    7 minutes 6 seconds

HARDWARE USED:
    Pentium-II 233mhz w/64MB 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:


Well, the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about the natural
world was that over 99% of it is under water.  I've always liked dolphins
(don't we all? :->), and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to
integrate a delphenic model that I've been tinkering with for the pass year
into a scene.  I know that the jet is hardly "organic," but I needed to
break the monotony of the sky with something, and a flying bird just
wouldn't be close or large enough.  I tried to think of some other creature
that would have any business being in the air twenty miles off the
coastline, but a bird was about it (OK, so the real reason I didn't do a
bird is that I'm programmer, not an artist, and designing a decent-looking
bird model would have taken me weeks [If not months].  The above reasoning
sounds so much better to my injured pride though.... :-P).  I was going to
add a couple of human divers to break the monotony of the water, but the
competition deadline sort of snuck up on me.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:


DOLPHINS: The main dolphin model is made up purely (except for the eyes) of
bezier patches that were linked together by Moray's bezier editor (as much
as I like Moray, the beizer editor is one area that could definitely be
improved [an UNDO feature would be nice].  If anyone knows of a good, cheap
[preferably free] beizer/raw tringle mesh editor, please leave a comment).
The other dolphins are identical to the main dolphin (the one in the
foreground), except for a few minor changes to each.

DOLPHIN TEETH: A height-field that a created in PSP.

JET:  A simple CSG collection of cylinders, boxes, and spheres.  The plane's
texture is the WrinkleGray texture included in Moray's library, which is the
only thing other than the sky texture (Tropics_Cloud_Sky, also part of
Moray's texture library) that I stole from somebody else.

JET TRAIL: A long cylinder filled with a white emitting halo.

WATER: The top of the water is a plane with a ripples-based colormap, with
one end of the water-blue colormap being more transparent than the other
(hence, the dark ripples in the water).  The water itself is a blue ground
fog.

SKY: A plane with a modified Tropics_Cloud_Sky texture.




KNOWN BUGS:

The things that, as a purely "technical person" :-), I don't like about my
own image.

EYES:  Number one on the things that make me go "augh" (expression of
revulsion) when I look at the scene.  I kept tinkering with them for over
an hour, but just couldn't make them look like human eyes, much less dolphin
ones.  If anyone has any suggestions, please comment.

FLIPPERS: The problem with using a free-hand editor to design bezeir-patch
objects is connecting the various objects smoothly.  To me, the flippers
look like they just jut straight of of the main body, instead of being an
extension of the body.

BEAK (Snout): I don't know exactly what I don't like about it, but it just
doesn't look realistic to me.  I think that maybe its too wide and not as
pronounced as it should be (at least on the common bottle-nosed dolphin).