TITLE: Cthulhu NAME: Sean Hamilton COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: Sean_Hamilton@amrcorp.com TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV Ray TOOLS USED: Moray RENDER TIME: 1 hour, 48 minutes HARDWARE USED: PII/300, 64 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: After 18 years in the Merchant Marine, I thought I had seen everything, that I was at home with the sea. I was wrong. Nary a week out of port, our Captain, upon reading a strange book acquired in Singapore on our last voyage, begin to exhibit signs of delusion. All of us being lifelong sailors and as friendly with a flask as any man could be, we assumed it was a particularly stout drought of rum responsible for his paranoia. Three nights ago, under the light of a growing moon, we heard a series of screams and a gunshot. Rushing up on deck we saw the Captain at the deck winch, and the body of his First Mate swinging from the cable; shot dead after what the Captain called, 'an act of mutiny'. The Captain changed our course, from westerly, to due North. No one dared to question him. The body of our comrade was a grisly reminder of our Captain's insanity. Tonite, we were awakened in our beds by a great crash in the water, as though a storm had suddenly hit the ship. We rushed out to secure our cargo and beheld the Captain kneeling at the bow, his arms outstretched towards the darkness and his voice crying out, "Ia Cthulhu! Cthulhu Ftaghn!" The storm that sunk my ship was no storm of this earth. There was no wind, no rain, no lightening. Only the mad crashing of waves and boiling ocean. Somehow, I survived the onslaught, having been thrown free of the ship as it crumpled beneath me. I look around the churning Pacific, treading water, daring to hope for some rescue. The sea continues to boil and from the depths of the darkness I see a shape, illuminated by the moonlight, with a shining eye piercing into my heart, its tentacles reaching out for me. I know now, that there are more fearful things in the sea than sharks; and there are worse ways to die than drowning. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Wow, my first Lovcraftian render. I'm so proud! Anyway, this image was a lot of fun to create. It is my third attempt at a water theme for this image, the first two being uninspired and poorly executed. Tech stuff: The tentacles are hacked torii, since most of the tentacles were going to be hidden by the ocean waves, I didn't see the need to create the full objects. All the textures are my own creations or modifications. The eye is as anatomically correct as you might except a monster's eye to be. It has interior gel, pupil, sclara, lens, and iris. The eye and eyelid were created as seperate objects so I could rotate them as necessary to change where Cthulhu was 'looking'. The iris has heavy irdescence and the eye contains a point and spot light to make it all glow. The starfield is an imagemap of the tycho8 galaxy, so the picture really has that 'otherworldly' look to it. There is no ambient lighting to light the scene, only a single half-power point light about 10000 units away to simulate the moon. The waves I initially made as heightfields. But I couldn't find my artistic groove with my source files so I trashed to heightfield and created bezier patches instead. Initially I wanted media effects and antialiasing involved in the final render, but when I put them in, my render time jumped to over four days, and I didn't like how it looked. So yes, the render has no antialiasing of any kind, and I like the way it looks, especially with the blurry stars in the background. I think this image has several problems, most of which I don't know how to fix yet, but I'll see if my predictions match yours. :) Enjoy, and happy swimming! Sean Hamilton