TITLE: Ericeira
NAME: Francois Dispot
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: wozzeck@club-internet.fr
WEBPAGE: http://www.wozzeck.net
TOPIC: The Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ericeira.jpg
ZIPFILE: ericeira.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PvMegaPOV 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 
    XEmacs 21.1, Terraform 0.7.2, J. Vives' clouds macro, Gilles Tran's
window and chair macros, blobman 4.2, gimp 1.1.22

RENDER TIME: 
    6h 17

HARDWARE USED: 
    p200 + dual PII/448 under Linux 2.2.x and pvm 3.4.2 (see below)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


An idea I had about a year ago, mixing several observations from different
beaches and weathers in Portugal with the absurd world it is supposed to belong
to.

This picture will be part of my "Germain Landfelder Official Calendar", and will
stand near a related (French) text as usual.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This picture is AFAIK the first one made with a cluster and successfully using
Povray's radiosity. I used it as a real life test for my port of Megapov to
PVM. Although the test renderings were usually made using both computers at
once, the final rendering uses too much memory, and I had to drop my p200, The
final rendering was made using only 2 processors. The resulting speed is about
185% of a single processor speed.

The remote coast, sea and cloudscape were created using well known tools and
macros, while I wanted to concentrate on the beach itself, keeping the whole at
an acceptable memory level for a distributed rendering.

The scene, especially for the beach, makes an intensive use of macros, random
generators, and the extremely useful trace() function.

There are several levels of detail for the objects on the beach, especially
blob-men, to save memory. Blob men are very convenient for this kind of scenes
where details are limited but characters must look like acceptable humanoids.