TITLE: In Terra Pax
NAME: David McLeish
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: dmcleish@zip.com.au
WEBPAGE: http://listen.to/shish
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: terrapax.jpg
ZIPFILE: terrapax.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    none

RENDER TIME: 
    3h 49m 14s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 233


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The title means "peace on earth". The pond is loosely based around the one in
the Memorial
Courtyard in Trinity Grammar School, Sydney, except that I added grass, made it
less murky,
took out the fish and didn't build the fountain on an old tyre. Thanks go to the
friend who
wanted me to make the bird blue, which in the end looked a lot better.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Everything in the scene was scripted in POV-Ray over about two days, apart from
the sky that
is reflected a little in the pond, which is a standard one I made a while ago. I
can't even
remember how it works. It's in SKY.INC. Nothing fancy.

The water is a blob, with each sphere placed along a parabola in the X-Y plane
then rotated
randomly around the X axis. The pond surface is exactly the same material, with
an added
rippling normal pattern.

There are two types of stone pattern in the scene - wet and dry stone. Wet is a
little darker
than dry, it has a brighter and tighter specular highlight and it reflects a
bit. The bricks
(which were placed by hand - very tedious work, especially when they didn't meet
at the end)
are dry at the top and gradually change to wet further down. The bottom of the
pond, which is
the inside of a flattened sphere, is wet. The fountain is a combination of wet
and dry in a
bozo pattern.

The grass is just one tuft with three blades, repeated randomly 5000 times
behind the pond,
and another 100 in front of it. The fern-type thing is almost fractal, except
that it stops
at the third level. Everything else is pretty much as it appears, and it's all
in the source
files.