TITLE: Elements Checkerboard
NAME: Franck Angella
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: angella@goelette.tsi.u-bordeaux.fr
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/2737
TOPIC: elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: faele.jpg
ZIPFILE: faele.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.01 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    PaintShopPro, Spatch

RENDER TIME: 
    5 days and 14 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    PPro200 - 256M

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The picture represents the four well-known elements
on a checkerboard, each on them on one edge,
balancing the universe (... ok, stop smoking now...)

I think that the main difficulty was representing air.
How can we represent something totally transparent ?
I choosed the tornado. For the water, I choosed ice. For
the fire, a volcano. And for earth, mud floor.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This scene is a collection of four independent scenes.

-ground: the mud floor is an heightfield (designed
with PSP). The texture is an image map.

-fire: I choosed a volcano. Again I used an heightfield.
There is an orange light inside it. I added some fog
around the volcano using two halos.

-water: the ice cube is made of two superellipsoids.
The water puddle is a big blob randomly generated in
a #while structure. The whole thing is transparent
but a little blue.

-air: the most difficult part I think. The tornado
is made of two parts: the inside is a double halo
in a tornado-like shape created with Spatch. The
outside is a collection of particles. Each partially
transparent particle is randomly scaled and rotated.
Then it is placed on a randomly place spiral going
from the top of the tornado to its bottom. There are
20 spirals and 500 particles per spiral. To make it
look less regular some noise was added.

The checkerboard was done with some CSG; some stone
slabs have been rotated, moved or broken. The bottom
of the checkerboard was created using an upside-downed
heigtfield.

There is one spotlight just above the center of the
checkerboard and a pointlight under it. The sky is
a skysphere with hot colors on the right and cold
ones on the left.