EMAIL: manorton@jps.net
NAME: Mike Norton
TOPIC: water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Spilled Water Late Afternoon
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.jps.net/manorton/3d

RENDERER USED: Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT 2.3.6 for Win32) Free Raytracing Program.

TOOLS USED: solidThinking for NT
RENDER TIME: 6 hours 28 minutes 20 seconds (6:28:20)
HARDWARE USED: Pent 133 with 32 megs ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I used BMRT, which is a, for non-commercial, free rendering tool kit that is Renderman compliant.  It is a 
raytracer with radiosity and other real cool features.  You can find more about BMRT at 
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/student/gritz/bmrt.html

In this image I try to show off a few of the features of BMRT.  Hope you enjoy it.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I started out with setting up the scene in solidThinking for Windows.  http://www.gestel.it   Once I had 
everything set I started working with shaders to get a good look.  The best shader in the whole bunch to 
me is the carpet shader.  I must say I love that carpet.  It took some time to remember how to set things 
up and after about 2 days I got everything to the point I liked it.

I then created the glass model.  I started out using a cylinder for the outside with a rounded bottom.  Then 
made another cylinder and but a half-sphere on the bottom to difference with the outer.  Well this worked 
ok but there were artifacts when the glass shader was applied.  So I used it as a model and simply made 
a NURBS curve in sT that matched the wall of the glass then lathed it and got a real nice glass.

I then turned to Photoshop to create a spill pattern.  I then imported the image into sT and made a 
NURBS heightfield out of it.  Placed it in the correct place and then shaded it.

The window light coming in the room is a special shader called windowlight.  It will create as many pains 
as you set up and really does a good job.  Im going to try to hack on this shader a little bit and see if I can 
come up with a windowblinds shader that will show light coming through a window with blinds in front of it.

After getting everything in place it took a little more tweaking to get the shaders right.  Im still not 100% 
satisfied with them but seeing its Friday night ill let it ride.  

I then started the final render.  I set the radiosity setting to 200 and it took about an hour to render.  But 
when I saw the image there was bad aliasing along the edges of the doorpost.  So to the docs I went and 
I set a custom pixel-sampling rate.  Sent it to rendrib and a little after 6 hours I got this great image.  I 
hope you like it.

I am including the sT .stm file, I will also include a Rhino source for it, the Rib and any non-standard 
shaders with my entry.  You may study it and render it if you wish.  Just be warned that since sT produced 
the RIB file it will not be as legible as if someone had hand coded it and commented it thoroughly.