TITLE: Rescue
NAME: Alun Thomas
COUNTRY: U.K.
EMAIL: alun.thomas@convergys.com
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: adt_sea.jpg
ZIPFILE: adt_sea.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 
    Spatch

RENDER TIME: 
    18 59 24

HARDWARE USED: 
    P-II / 400

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A shipwreck survivor tries to attract the attention of
a search party.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The people were created using Hero Ngauv's blob people library. I can't find
this library on the web anymore,
so I've included a copy in my .zip file (its been slightly
modified, but nothing major).

The rescue boat and its oars were modeled using spatch,
as was the survivor's hair, and the cap worn by one of the
rescuers.

The remaining object were hand coded in POVray's scripting
language.

The broken mast and plank were created by subtracting
an assortment of cones from each end of a cylinder and a
box respectivly.

The bottle is a lathe object, with a texture mapped label
- pointing in the wrong direction to read :-(

The fog is a large disc shaped (well, sort of) object with
an invisible surface and a media filled interior. I found I
could improve the appearance of the fog by placing a hollow invisible sphere
inside the media, which seems to force MegaPOV to take one set of samples
between the camera and
the edge of the sphere, and then another set between the sphere and the edge of
the media - this concentrates the samples in the foreground.

The water's a flat plane with a surface normal ripple pattern, using MegaPOV's
variable reflection feature.
I'd like to have added extra ripples spreading out from the various objects in
the water, but I just ran out of time.

This is my first IRTC entry, and its been a bit of a "learning experience" - if
I was doing this again, I'd probably do more test renders with individual
objects (rather than the whole scene). I'd probably try to avoid
relying on a media quite so much (its really pushed up
the rendering time).

Thanks for reading this far,
Alun.