TITLE: Lakeside dinner
NAME: Jim Knepley
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jknepley@chisp.net
WEBPAGE: skinner.chisp.net/raytrace
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lakeside.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Photoshop, 4 Elements

RENDER TIME: 
    approximately 2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6/233, 128MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

My wife has always liked water.  As a surprise I served her a romantic
candlelight dinner, prepared by a local restaurant.  Tonight, she's dining on
our deck overlooking the lake.  It's overcast tonight, but warm.  Water lapping
on the shore sings with the music that plays from concealed speakers.  As a
joke, I bought a menu and a wine list and put them on the table.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I used the RayTracer renderer, with every option turned on, and a maximum ray
depth of 25.

The sky and moon are a result of 4 Elements:Wind.  The land masses are lofted
meshes that are created in 4 Elements:Land.  The candle flame is, would you
believe, done with 4 Elements: Fire.  The water was originally a 4 Elements
shader on the bump channel, but I was having a hard time getting good results. 
It's now two combined wood shaders.

Just about everything you see here is a recreation of items around my house. 
The chair, the table, the glasses, the candlestick, the deck, the utensils...
you get the idea.  Most of it was done with the free-form modeler in RDS.  The
flower petals were done in sPatch.

There are three light sources here.  The moon is a light source, a lightbulb
that is in the same position as the flame on the candle, and a feint spotlight
to give an outline of the landmass on the left.

Most of the shaders are procedural.  Those that aren't are the main surface of
the deck (a great wood shader that I got from www.serious3d.com) and the color
channel of the shoreline.

I saved the output rendering to a .BMP file and converted it to a JPG with
PhotoShop.