TITLE: Point Melancholy NAME: Stephen M. Farrell COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: melnchol.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows, Paint Shop Pro 6.0 (signature and image compression only) RENDER TIME: approx. 1 1/2 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 266, 128 mg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Enshrouded in fog, a solitary lighthouse stands at the edge of a stormy sea, shining its mournful beam across the water, providing a beacon of hope to those ships and sailors struggling to find their way home. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The mountains are a simple bump map heightfield, which turned out pretty well except for some pixellation along the edges. I used a skysphere to create a dark, cloudy sky, although it's hard to make it out since it blends into the fog so much. The lighthouse is a simple lathe object combined with csg. The cottages and ship are also basic csg. Continuing my experiments with fog, there is a two-layer blue-ish ground fog... one layer covers is fairly transparent and covers the whole scene, while the other is denser and stops about one third of the way up the mountains. I used media with a bump-mapped density to create the main white-ish fog, and a media-filled cone to simulate the light from the lighthouse. (This could use some work... it's a little more solid-looking than I'd like it to be.) For the water, my friend Keven helped me with the math to come up with a simple routine to generate a mesh with randomly-placed 'peaks' to simulate choppy water. The texture could probably use some work. The shoreline consists of a multi-pointed conic prism topped with a cubic prism of the same shape but with a different texture. The trees are all while loops which use cylinders of random lengths to give a slightly different shape to each one, and while they are not perfect, I think they are a decent simulation of pine trees. (And while it takes a while to render the tree-covered parts of the scene, it doesn't take forever, unlike some of the other techniques I attempted.) The two people in the scene (one in the water, and the other can barely be made out... he's about to fall backwards over the edge of the ship just above the rope ladder) are blob creations. Not sure how well these turned out, but for realism the ship needed something resembling a crew, at least! Most of the objects in the scene needed to be given a fairly high level of ambient to keep them from fading completely into the fog. In closing, I'd again like to thank everyone who commented on my last entry for their thoughts. If nothing else, I think this entry is at least an improvement over my last one.