EMAIL: douge@nls.net
 NAME: Douglas Eichenberg
 TOPIC: The Sea
 COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING
            COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
 TITLE: DE_Siren
 COUNTRY: USA
 WEBPAGE: www.getinfo.net/douge
 RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 0.5a
 TOOLS USED: Moray v3.2, NuGraf/PolyTrans v2.2j, 
             MicroGrafx Picture Publisher 8,
             AutoCAD r14 
 RENDER TIME: 5hrs 22m 46s 
 HARDWARE USED: 600 MHz PIII/Windows 2000/128Mb
 
 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I figured most of the entries would be boats or 
                    underwater scenes, so I decided to do something
                    different.  One of the things that came to mind
                    was the Greek myth of the Siren.  What I ended
                    up with was a sort of surreal take on the story,
                    with the gramaphone representing the siren,
                    singing her song over and over for eternity,
                    lulling ships onto the rocks.  Surrounding her
                    are flags, symbolic of the ships that lie sunken
                    all around her.
                    

 DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
                    The water surface is a POV heightfield with a
                    layer of colored fog underneath it (thanks to
                    Jaime for his great water in Running.jpg).  The
                    rocky surface under the water is an image map.
                    I experimented with bump maps, but it didn't make
                    any noticeable difference (except in the render
                    time).  The three larger rocks are oddly-scaled
                    spheres with granite image maps spherically 
                    mapped onto them.  The flags were created in 
                    AutoCAD by extruding polylines and subtracting
                    a couple of rotated boxes.  The resulting shape
                    was then converted into a mesh of triangles with
                    PolyTrans.  The gramaphone model came from 3DCafe
                    and was also converted with PolyTrans.  I used 
                    reflection blurring in the metal finish, plus a
                    little irid.  I also used the reflction_exponent
                    keyword.  I'm really not happy with the metal, but 
                    it's a WIP... suggestions and comments are
                    much appreciated! PS: the zipped files are over
                    16M, so I decided to spare the server space...
                    just e-mail me if you want them and I'll gladly
                    post them to my web site.