TITLE: The last keeper
NAME: Christophe BOUFFARTIGUE
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: christophe.bouffartigue@libertysurf.fr
WEBPAGE: http://tofbouf.multimania.com/

TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cbsea.jpg
ZIPFILE: cbsea.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        WinMegapov 0.5 (scene development)


TOOLS USED: 

        sPatch    (Mike Clifton)
        Hamapatch (???, http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Ginza/6625/soft10.html)
        3DWin     (Thomas Baier, http://www.stmuc.com/thbaier/products.html)
        UVMapper  (Steve Cox, http://home.pb.net/~stevecox/)
        OBJuvPOV  (Cliff Bowman, http://www.who3d.cwc.net/Models.html)
        The GIMP  (Peter Mattis & Spencer Kimball, http://www.gimp.org/)


RENDER TIME: 

        ~ 4h 10mn


HARDWARE USED: 

        Pentium MMX 180MHz  48 Mo RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        The automatization of the lighthouses has begun in 1906 in France, so
was the wishes
        of the state. But the recommandations were not very well followed in the
fisrt years.
        But, in the early 1910's, the first permanent light was intalled at the
Tevennec's
        lighthouse, off the "Baie des Tr_pass_s" (Deceased Persons Bay
(brrr))...

        Since this time, 93 of the 152 french lighthouses are not occupied
anymore. Think of
        this lighthouse keeper, alone at the top, as it is his very last day in
HIS lighthouse.
        Tomorrow, the boat will take him away, like so many others before
him...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


        The background
        ==============
        It's basically a sky sphere (with a slightly yellow bozo pattern),
partially masked by
        a grey square, that gives the colors gradation. The colors are inpierd
by a picture
        I saw in a magazine...

        The sea
        =======
        After having played with ridged multi-fractals and its terrible
rendering time on my
        (so) old PC, I've comen once again to height fields. The one for the sea
is a seamless
        height field, generated with POV, using bozo and wrinkles. The one for
the rock is a
        combination of cylindrical pattern and ridgemf function. The sea texture
uses patterned
        textures, color fading and MegaPOV's realistic fading.

        The lighthouse
        ==============
        The lighthouse is a "perturbated" cone, i.e. a set of cones and spheres
along a not so
        straight axis. It's all CSG, nothing very excinting... The roof of the
little house is
        really made of a lot of slates, and the lenses of the light that you can
hardly see, are
        real Fresnel lenses. It's impossible to see those details, but I had fun
to model them...

        The "fauna"
        ===========
        The seagulls were modelled with sPatch, exported to DXF, converted to
OBJ with 3DWin,
        uv_mapped with UVMapper, and converted to mesh2 format using OBJuvPOV.
The textures were
        created with The Gimp (Linux version).
        The man was modelled with Hamapatch (my fisrt try), and exported
directly to POV. The
        face uses an image of Fabien Mosen (with his permission), which gave me
good advices
        during the development of the scene, like many others on the french
newsgroup. The image
        is not provided, so you'll have to find your own image if you want to
render
        this scene... The seagulls files will be available as soon as possible
on my homepage.