TITLE: Human and nature
NAME: Toni Bratincevic
COUNTRY: Croatia
EMAIL: tbratinc@barok.foi.hr
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/Intercepto
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tbgarden.jpg
ZIPFILE: 
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.1
TOOLS USED: POVRay 3.1, Moray 3.1, sPatch, PhotoShop
RENDER TIME: 9h
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133(64Mb) for scene modeling and Celeron 466(128MB) for rendering 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
In the beginning of this IRTC I had some nice ideas for pictures, but at the end I decided
to try to reproduce one photography I find out on internet and make it real
and detailed as I can. As I said, this the idea for this picture was borrowed from
real life ... unfortunately I don't have any other information about this temple-garden
and culture which it belongs to. The hardest part was at the end of this project, when I
needed the name for my picture. I spent many hours and days thinking of what will
be nice title and finally I came up with this name. When we use our creativity to create
something like gardens and buildings like that one in the picture, we can create something
fantastic, something very beautiful, something that only humans can do.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
As in all my previous pictures I used Moray for modeling, sPatch for organic like shapes and
POVRay for rendering. Since my computer isn't strong enough, before I started modeling
the temple structure and garden, I created boxes in Moray that will be used as bounds for
parts of scene. Boxes are exported to they own spaces (files) and I started to modeling
every part separately.
First, the structure of temple was modeled. It was very tedious task. I took over 10 days
to create this model. When I modeled in Moray all elements of temple, I exported that elements
so that it can be rendered with POV. After first test renderer, I started to code textures
that will be used for this model, and apply them on the elements in scene. After this part 
I started working on garden. Bushes in garden are made using Height Fields. As you can see, they
look very nice. Maybe if I have used some transparent textures it will look better, but this
is enough. When I created bushes, I decided to model fountain. Fountain was modeled in Moray
using RotSweep. Textures for fountain are again coded in POV editor. The water was modeled
using one cylinders and bpatches with texture. This part can also be done using
lots of metaballs and few while loops, but that way will probably increase rendering time.
The elephants are created in sPatch. They are not very detailed models since they are very
small in the picture. As you can see, they have nice gold texture I used on roof but with some
modifications... I added another texture layer with some rust. Branches for trees are made
using sPatch. I didn't used my tree algorithm because it can't done this kind of branches, but
I used few macros from my tree generator to create leafs on those trees. These trees eat
more memory that anything else in the picture. :)
Flowers are also created using some macros from my tree generator but with some modifications.
Sky is constructed using one sky_sphere and plane with clouds. Clouds are made using one plane
and wrinkles pattern in texture. I used some tricks to get more realistic clouds. I think that
they look very nice for 2D texture without layers. I try ed to created some tests with media
but since my computer don't have enough power for this kind of tasks, this is abandoned.
Clouds are probably the worst part of my picture, but no one is perfect. :)
At final rendering I used radiosity and area light to get more realistic picture, and I used
one box with high ambient value (8) to give more light when using radiosity.

If you have any questions, be free to email me. Tnx.

P.S. 
The source for this picture will be available on my homepage when I add this picture to
my IRTC gallery.