TITLE: Summer Inferno
NAME: Vishram Dalvi
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: vdalvi@mcd.intel.com
WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/SoHo/Coffeehouse/4121/index.html
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Bryce 3D, anti-aliased
TOOLS USED: Bryce 3D
RENDER TIME: 6hrs
HARDWARE USED: PentiumII, 266MHz, 64MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This image shows a confluence of the 4 elements of nature. Earth, fire, water and wind.
Since eternity, fire has been responsible for revitalizing aging forests. It burns away the
dense underbrush created over the years by fallen pine needles, leaves and dead branches.
It also removes dead and decaying trees and creates a clearing in which newer seeds and
saplings can grow. Such fires are frequently started by natural sources such as lightning
during summer thunderstorms.

This image depicts a coniferous forest in a mountainous region. The drought of the past
years has covered the forest floor with an incendiary mixture. The intense heat of the
summer day has created a low-pressure zone, which has brewed up a rainstorm. A freak
lightning bolt preceding the rain, has started this inferno. You can almost hear the fire
crackling as it feasts on the underbrush. The air is filled with smoke, which carries a
strong smell of pine oil. The puny drizzle, as it evaporates even before reaching the
ground, is just adding to the smokiness. The falling drops are catching the light from the
flames and the sunset and show up as orange-ish streaks in the foreground. The wind is
slanting the precipitation and also spreading the smoke through out the forest, warning its
residents, "Get out of the way!"

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
When I read the topic description, many ideas came to my
mind. I thought about linking the origins of us humans (and
all animal creation) to star dust deposited by comets. Then
I thought about showing Mendeleyev inspecting various elements
and putting them on his periodic chart. But finally I settled
down on this forest fire theme.

Bryce 3D was the perfect tool for creating such a scene. First
I created the mountain terrains. Then I created a few types
of coniferous trees (bryce objects). To save computational
effort, I mixed tree objects with 2D tree picts. After generating
the forest, I picked the angle I liked. Then I created a few
stone objects and applied the fire texture to them. Then I
created a few more stone objects, positioned them in air and
applied the smoke texture to them. Then I tried out a lot of
sky and cloud setups until I got the evening, rainstorm look.
Finally, I created 2 planes and applied rain material. Then
I adjusted their rotational angle until I got the rain
falling just as I wanted.

After spending a lot of time on positioning all the objects
as desired, the image was ready to render. I initially
rendered using 16X over-sampled anti-aliasing. But accidentaly
over-wrote this image :-( Stupid me! Wasted over 44hrs of
rendering. Running out of time, I used a simpler anti-aliasing
this time and got done in about 6 hours. It doesn't look too
bad, I think. I am not sending the zip file because it only
helps people who own Bryce 3D.