TITLE: Gone Fishin'

NAME: Ian Shumsky
COUNTRY: UK

EMAIL: ianshumsky@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/4724/

TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: iswater.jpg
ZIPFILE: iswater.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PoyRay For Windows 3.02


TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5.0 (Colours)
 Photoshop 4.0 (JPEG Conversion)


RENDER TIME: 

Time For Parse:  0 hours 17 minutes 39.0 seconds (1059 seconds)
Time For Trace: 22 hours  5 minutes 57.0 seconds (79557 seconds)
    Total Time: 22 hours 23 minutes 36.0 seconds (80616 seconds)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II, 300MHz, 64Meg Memory.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The inspiration for this scene came from my summer holidays of many
years ago. Most evenings, my father and I would go fishing off rocks
around Anglesey, North Wales, watching the moon and stars come out
and highlight the bay. Most nights, the local fishermen would also
lay crab pots and mark them with buoys.

This is my first entry in the IRTC -- I now appreciate just how much
effort people put in to their entries! I know it's not a very
imaginative scene, but it has come out almost as I wanted. If I had
time, there are still a couple of things that I would change, mainly
the quality of the land and the water normal.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The water is a large box with a dark, highly reflective surface and
modified by the wave normal. I tried to get this to work on a *large*
sphere to try and get a better horizon, but just couldn't get the
thing to work. Oh, well, never mind...

The small boat is straight forward CSG. I think it still needs work
to add more details. The anchor chain is also built by CSG... just
like it is described in the help :)

The buoys are also simple CSG, including the addition of a hollow
glass ball at the top of the buoy containing a light. There are
actually 3 small area lights in each buoy, one for each of the xz,
xy and yz planes, of 1/2 strength white light. I found this gives
a better illumination of the area. The buoys are randomly
positioned in a #while loop and are also rotated a random amount
through their x and z axis to give the feeling of 'bobbing' in the
water.

The land is a height field. I used one of the samples packaged
with POV-Ray.

The sky is a simple sky_sphere with multiple grades of MidnightBlue.

The moon is a large area light and 'looks_like' a sphere that has
an image of the moon's surface wrapped around it. The actual image
was downloaded from 'http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/earth.html'. At the
site there is also a 12Meg JPEG version of the image (which works
out at a 70Meg gif image) and works very well when doing detailed
renders of the moon.

The stars are 8000 fixed distance point lights disguised as
spheres, randomly distributed in a hemisphere around <0,0,0> via
a #while loop. Each sphere has a random size and colour. The
colours are all 'bright' (i.e. usually more than rgb <1,1,1>)
with more emphasis on the blue. I think the effect works quite
well (and would work correctly in an animation) but it doesn't
half slow down rendering time.