EMAIL: ulf.schreiber@gmx.net
NAME: Ulf Schreiber
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dawn in Marocco
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.fen.baynet.de/ulf.schreiber/ 
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 W95

TOOLS USED: Leveller, Minesweeper (the scene was full of mines, especially 
                      the HFs output from Leveller did not stop exploding!)
		
RENDER TIME: 

HARDWARE USED: K6/250 oc'ed, 
					(i486/33 for blind-writing the cactus-macros and also first testing of that - at least a DX with FPU) 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Waking up, it's getting too warm to sleep in the sleeping-bag - MUHAAAAH - where am I? 
Yes, north of Marakech, near the well of that nice Berber farmer family that invited us last evening.
Time for my good-morning-photo. Opening the bag with the money and so on wrapped to my left leg, 
taking out the camera. Nice view with the well and the Atlas Mountains far away in the clear air.
Wait what's coming there? The cows getting their morning water.

.
w
a
i
t
.

>CLICK<

As the obvious scene for "Water" consist mainly of a well tuned reflecting texture with excessive use
of finish{normal}, and I'm surely not the best at simulating fluids, I decided to do something _about_
water, not water itself (I hope this behavior is not some disease - compare my entry in "Nature").
Still influenced from my tour around Marocco this summer, I decided to trace something from that. 
- Water and Africa, that's good.

P.S.
The scene did not happen exactly like this when I was down in Marocco this summer, but all those 
things did take place. At least I have a photo from one morning (already out of the sleeping-bag, so
no knee in the left lower corner) from the well of the family. The cows passed when it was _not_ too
hot to sleep ;-)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Photographed in Africa!
Backwards-raytracing with natural tools (like space, the sun, air molekules as atmosphere.. :)

I started with modelling the cows. Really. And I wasted very, very much time on it... They consist of 
a doubled heightfield (Leveller, certainly), like old tin toys. Same with the legs, the head is 
classical blob.
The landscape is obvious - more heightfields (The mountain chain in the south is one heightfield, 
repeated about ten times. But how did I make the mountains fade?
(hint: it's not atmosphere, interior or fog, look close!)
Semitransparent mirrors, with a texture map using the new cylinder pattern, the mountains themselves
are behind the cam (due to problems with overlapping of the mountains and reflections of the close hf).
The cactusses are a simple recursive #macro, luckily these grow that simple in nature.
The sleeping-bag (that lilac object in the lower right corner) is HF again, with 2 blended normals
applied.
The sky sphere has really many textures over each other and is completely symmetrical to the xy-plane
(needed for the mountan-fading method)