EMAIL: spanky@wpi.edu NAME: John D. Stevens TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT TITLE: A Foreshadowing of Tomorrow COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: Shards of Light(http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky) RENDERER USED: Povray3.1 TOOLS USED: HF-Lab RENDER TIME: 31h 37m 15s HARDWARE USED: AMD K6 233 w/48mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The final stages of a massive world wide volcanic meltdown are taking place in this image. Great floods and pyroclastic flows have devastated a major portion of the world. This image takes place in the Great Northwest of America, somewhere near the Cascade mountain range. A small hunters cabin rots away on a slender piece of land vaulted high above the flood plain. Life hangs precariously on the edge of salvation and destruction, represented by the questionable grip of the forest on the last vestiges of land. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Let me just preface the rest of my comments with this "Media is too damn slow". I don't really mind if final rendering takes a few days, it's in the test renders that I really get annoyed with the time it takes. I started off by creating the volcano. This was designed to be the centerpiece of my image, and had the most work put into it, especially the volcanic ash plume. You can view the development of my ash plume by checking out these images: http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest1.jpg http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest2.jpg http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest3.jpg http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/mediatest4.jpg http://davis.wpi.edu/~spanky/plume.jpg It took me a greater part of February to get the plume to look even close to where I wanted it. After development of the ash plume, I started work on the foreground, which I initially wanted to do with height fields. However, the more work I put into it using height fields, the less satisfied I became. Therefore I made a risky decision. I decided to use blobs to model my foreground terrain instead. Initially I only used blobs to create the middle pinnacle, which I am very satisfied with, but since the competition deadline was quickly approaching, and my height fields on the right and left looked horrible, I decided to use blobs for them instead as well. The left side cliffs are all blobs, as well as the right side mushroom caps and support stems. I had to hand code all of this stuff, so it was extremely tedious. The boulders in the scene were also blobs, and textured using a layering effect. The trees were created using upside down cones combined in layers of increasing size as you get closer to the bottom of the tree. Basically, to get the pine look, you create a semi-transparent image map to paste onto the cones. You can get many effects this way, and in addition, it renders alot faster. The ocean is simply a complicated texture, and with a two layered fog over it, makes for a nice effect. The lens flare for the sun was a modified version of "sun3" from Chris Colefax's lens flare package. I am still not satisfied with the following scene elements: 1) The grass on the pinnacles 2) Some of the layout of the foreground could be better 3) I'm sure there is a better camera angle in this scene Anyways, some of the include files in this scene are very large, so I couldn't fit them on my only 1.44mb disk. Please email me if you want those files, and I'll see if I can get my roommate to lend me his zip drive. Regards John