TITLE: Rock Garden of the Gods NAME: Paul Vaughan COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: bcooper761@aol.com TOPIC: Garden COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: Godgardn.jpg ZIPFILE: Godgardn.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1e for Windows 95 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro ........ .tga --> .jpg ......... adjust hue & contrast of image_map Teragen ........ Landscape creation program (height mesh plus height and slope dependent textures) Wilbur ......... Used to convert from Teragen height data to Povray triangle mesh Crossroads ...... Pov .inc file to .dxf so; Wct2Pov ..... >dxf to triangle mesh (both normal and smooth) RENDER TIME: 33 hrs ( a=0.2) / Clouds took the longest HARDWARE USED: 386DX / 33Mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I know this looks like it should be submitted to a "landscape" theme, but this is how I got here: When I found out that the theme was "garden" I wasn't particularly excited, but then it came to me, ... the idea of a Japanese rock garden. From what I've read, it's been described as a way to bring the beauty of nature into the crowded life style of their small island. For some reason, I then had an image of "Devil's Post Pile" as I last saw it .... and then a little bit more down contemplation lane, it came to me ... Why not a rock garden as the gods would do it with a whole planet to play with. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Landscape: The landscape was designed in Teragen including height and slope dependent textures. Teragen generates a 3d view from the parameters chosen. The saved elevation data was converted to Povray smooth_triangle mesh using Wilbur. Unfortunately, the normals were all unit vectors along the positive x-axis. So, I loaded the mesh into Crossroads and output as a dxf file so I could load it into Wctv2pov and produce smooth triangles. The background looks best with normal triangles and the foreground needs smooth, so the smooth mesh was skinned over the rough and the background smooth triangles were removed by hand from the inc file. To create an image_map for the landscape as created in Teragen, I took a shot from above, centered on the origin and with maximum possible zoom to flatten the perspective to a near 2-d view. Some tweaking of hue and contrast was done with PSP to get the look I wanted. Moon: Sphere with applied bump_map and image_map derived from NASA survey data. Zero ambient, full diffuse so main "sun" light illuminates. Clouds: Multi-layered planes each with a "cloud" pattern. Idea shamelessly lifted from "19141918" by Ian Shumsky who got it from "Canyon" by Jaime Piqueres Tree & Eagle: Stock mesh objects.