TITLE: Fan club
NAME: Fabien MOSEN
COUNTRY: BELGIUM (french speaking)
EMAIL: fabien.mosen@skynet.be
WEBPAGE: http://users.skynet.be/bs936509/povfr/index.htm
TOPIC: SEA
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT,
JPGFILE: fmsea.jpg
ZIPFILE: fmsea.zip

RENDERER USED: 
    MEGA-Pov 0.5a
     with the "particle patch".

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray's texture editor
    SpilinEditor

RENDER TIME: 
    8 hours.

HARDWARE USED: 
     PC with AMD K6-233, 128 Mb.
    
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    Some colorful fishes are watching their favourite film director on TV : 
    Cdt. Cousteau !

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

 I'd like to thank every programmer who contributed to the MegaPOV project, especially
Nathan Kopp, Chris Huff and Ron Parker.  This image wouldn't have been possible without
their incredible features.

 I first managed to set an interesting ground, using a ridged-multifractal-isosurface.
I rendered an orthographic view of the surface, then choose a portion of it, to match
the scene framing I had in mind.

 I did some research about how to fade the background, and found that the common fog
was unsuited, so I placed an attenuation media (in a big sphere).  In the 
beginning, I used both media and fog, but an unresolved problem occured when I put
a transparent object in the scene, so, after working a while with the media, I 
finally had to dump the media in favour of the fog.  (watching a Cousteau's documentary
made me realize that the current color scheme (darkish blue) was wrong, and fog was 
more suited to the new light-blue-greyish scheme.
 
 Using the "trace" function, I placed some little spiky plants (made with a simple
loop in a mesh) on the rocky ground.

 Using "spilin-editor", I made the fishbowl (lathe) and gave it a glass material.

 After visiting a fish-shop, I realised that making nice fins was the key to good
fish modelling.  These fins are a bunch of cones along many splines, each fin being
a net of splines controlled by 3 control-splines.  Some problems with the current
splines functions in MegaPOV made it difficult, but I finally managed to get it right.
The fish's body is a blob, the eye a CSG.

 The (barely visible) fish school in the background is made of sPatch-modelled (very 
simple) fishes, exported to dxf, converted to a mesh (for speed and memory reasons), 
and used in a particle system to "distribute" all the little fishes.
 
 Using a rather simple fractal algorithm, I created the coral and algas, recursive
loops from, respectively, splines and meshes.

 The TV-set is ordinary CSG.

 POV-Ray's internal blur postprocess was used to blur the background (and, due
to some limitations, it makes things look "wet", fine !), and the final image
was corrected in brightness/contrast/tone.