EMAIL: ahoudijk@gironet.nl NAME: Alfred Houdijk TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Fata Morgana COUNTRY: NL WEBPAGE: none yet RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 TOOLS USED: sPatch (skull, glass and can) and Lview pro (gamma and text) RENDER TIME: 8h 14m HARDWARE USED: Toshiba Tecra 510CDT laptop, P-133 (I think...), 48 MB. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The (idea of the) picture ------------------------- The subject of the competition is WATER. During a meeting at my work, not too interesting apparently, I was looking at my glass of water, and noticed the three guys sitting opposite to me reflected upside-down through the water. So I thougt to do a glass of water. In the meeting there was also a watercan, but that was round, somewhat conicly shaped. I didn't have one like that at home to model, so the one in the picture I designed myself. The glass and can should go in a scene, but what? (A meetingroom obviously not.) I thought: water is in everything, no life without water. So I came to the idea to create a desert, with a skull and some bones. The can and glass should be seen as a kind of fata morgana. The sun and pyramids came spontaneously while doing. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The process ----------- To begin with, this picture is only a hinch of what I had in mind. I am not satisfied at all with the shape of the skull, nor with the texture I gave it. I think of it as a skull that has been in the sand for decades, and it's worn off. The tray with the glass and can of water I would have liked to be more like a fata morgana. Also I would have liked the glass and can to have had ice cubes in them, as well as condense on the side. But I could not find out how to put those ideas into the picture. And I simply couldn't spend more time on this, since to me it's only a hobby. (But hey, this is only the first picture I did that is not an image of some part of my home! And I learned a lot doing it: using a patch-editor, focal blurr, gamma correction are some of the things. Oh, if only there was a quicker way to get the lighting just right. You still have to use the trial and error method, which is soooooo time consuming. At first, I tried to do glass objects and contents as separate patches. It turned out that the two together turned very dark, for wich I couldn't find an explanation. This has cost me a lot of time! So I changed the glass-objects, and they now have a raised bottom... This looked more like what I had in mind! I experimented with an extra shadeless lightsource but wasn't satified. It didn't make the picture more real. So I stuck with the single light source, the sun. And I think that is the way it sould be in this picture. Alfred Houdijk, 4 october 1998