TITLE: Oh combien de marins, combien de capitaines...
NAME: J_r_me BERGER
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: bergerj@iname.com
WEBPAGE: www.enst.fr/~jberger
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jbabyss.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for windows v 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    parse 43s, render 15h 27m 39s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P-II 333MHz, 64Mo RAM, Windows 98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  In the far future, man depredations have rendered the surface unfit
to live. Luckily, scientific advances have made it possible to live
at the bottom of the ocean. This picture shows a relic from the past
seen from a window of one of those submarine homes along with a
typical aquarium with the usual plastic model of a sunken ship...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

  I first wanted to make a picture of a sunken city (like the
Atlantide) with the hulk of a sunken ship in the middle. So I started
modelling the hull and deck with sPatch, but I quickly realized that
I was unable to achieve the effect I wanted and that my boat looked
more like a plastic model, so I decided to draw a parrallel between
the models people put in aquarium and a true sunken ship.

  About the boat:
    * the hull and deck were modelled with sPatch then I applied a
      brick texture to simulate planks, one of the wood textures that
      ship with POV for the deck and a gradient to paint the hull.
    * the mast and cabin are simple CSGs with plain color textures
      (except for the inside of the mast which is the same wood as
      the deck).
    * the algae blobs onthe deck, mast and roof are just that (blobs)
      with a layer of cylinders hidden just beneath the surface in
      order for the spheres to look properly splattered.
    * I then applied a bump normal to the whole ship for it to look
      properly decrepit from long immersion.

  The outside ground was made with 3 paraboloids and texture I made
from a standard pigment with a normal inspired from the height-field
of the 13storm entry in the previous round. The algae are random
blobs with a green pigment and bumps, the rocks are randomly scaled
spheres with one of the standard textures. The sea-shells are cones
with a spiral normal.

  Inside, the aquarium frame is actually a single box from which I
substracted other boxes. I then applied a combination of three
gradients with texture_maps and a variation of the standard
Brushed_Aluminium texture to give the impression that each beam is
independant. The fishes were modelled with sPatch and given an onion
texture with a texture_map of pure black and a Yellow-Black gradient
and a little turbulence (it's a shame: I'm rather proud of those
fishes, but this picture doesn't do them justice, they're too small).
The height-field for the sand was generated with a ripple normal,
then modified with Paint Shop Pro to have near vertical edges.

  I modelled a whole room to get proper reflections on the brass
surfaces. There are actually 6 chairs, 4 double wall-lamps, 1 ceiling
lamp and a table with a vase on it (try rendering the picture with
map_mode=true to see it). I had some trouble with the wall-lamps
globes that didn't cast any shadows so as not to block their light
sources but didn't cast shadows from the other lamps either until I
thought of putting another sphere inside with a 0.5 filter and
doubling the lights' strength to allow them to punch through.

  I tried to avoid sharp edges as much as possible in the visible
objects (except for the aquarium which is modelled from a sharp-edged
set of shelves I've got in my room) so I often used superellipsoid
rather than boxes and cylinders, and cut the angles I couldn't avoid
(such as the inside rim of the window) to have 45 degrees rather than
90 degrees angles.