EMAIL: pmccombs@hotmail.com
NAME: Peter McCombs
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Ocean Flight
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: 

	Pov-Ray for Linux, release 3.02

TOOLS USED:

	The Gimp v1.0
	PaintShop Pro v4
	Moray For Windows v3
	galaxy.sf (POV include file)
	
RENDER TIME: 31min 32sec
HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium 266 MMX, 64 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

	It's just some butterfly, gone completey mad, attempting to cross
a million miles of ocean.  Jonh Livinston Butterfly, perhaps?

	On the horizon you can see another ocean world, bathed in the glow of
the setting sun.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

	It's not easy for me to think of a really original interpretation 
of the theme "Water."  I always get some picture of the ocean, or something
generic like that.  There is, though, a million ways to paint the picture,
so I tried some things I'd been wanting to do for a long time. 

	Firstly, the water.  Coaxing REALLY convincing water out of a ray-
tracer can be a challenge.  My water utilizes the parallel-plane method.  
The upper plane is the water's surface.  I chose an agate pattern for the 
colormap, and a similar pattern for the bump map.  I'm using an algae-green
and a deep blue for this.  A filter value is enabled for these colors.  The 
finish is made highly reflective, with an ior setting of around 1.3.  

	The second plane is the ocean floor, placed not too far beneath the
surface plane.  For this I chose a simple bozo pattern with (if I remember)
brown and green being the primary colors.  Bumps have been introduced into 
the texture.

	I didn't like how the water met the horizon so abruptly, so I added 
a little ground fog, which gave it a nice effect, I think.

	The sky is a big sphere with a simple gradient texture.  The center 
of the gradient contains the sunset colors, fading out to blue, then black.  
Of course, the filter values increase as the gradient moves from orange to 
black, so it's completely transparent for most of the sky.  I added a good 
deal of turbulence to the gradient to make it interesting.  The sun is made 
with a halo contained inside of another, small sphere.  It was a simple 
operation.

	The planet is a larger sphere with an agate color and normal.  This
is completely outside of the sky sphere, but because of the filter values
on my atmosphere gradient, you get a nice atmospheric effect.  

	The stars were created using the GALAXY.SF include file.  There are
60,000 of them.

	The butterfly's wings are made from a scanned height field (a tiger 
swallowtail, or something of that nature).  I used the Gimp to isolate the 
left wing, then I saved two copies of it.  One copy was for the height field, 
the other for the image map.  Since the original color of the butterfly was
yellow, I used the Gimp to make it blue.

	To put the pieces together, and to invent the textures, I used Moray. 
I also used PaintShop pro very briefly to convert the Gimp's RLE compressed
.tga format into something that Moray could recognize for the butterfly wing
height-field.  

	Finally, the image was rendered in Linux with radiosity enabled and
converted to jpeg format with the Gimp.