EMAIL: wagner-michael@web.de
NAME: Michael Wagner
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Vulcano Island
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.wagner-hubert.de
RENDERER USED: Vue d'Esprit 3.1
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro, JPEG Optimizer
RENDER TIME: 11 hours
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 650, 128 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

An island with lots of palm trees, a vulcano and a corlal reef in front of it.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:


First, I made the reef with Vue d'Esprit's terrain editor (as the other terrains 
in the image, except the beach). I added some dozen corals (all plants are 
generated by Vue), scattered them and drop them on the reef. I deleted all 
corals over the surface of the water.
For the atmosphere, I used a preset one from Vue and modified it. I deleted 
all clouds and added new ones. The sun shines from the left and is in a low 
position, so that there are those blue / light blue shadow effects in the reef. 
The next thing to do was the beach. I made a height map in PSP, imported it 
into Vue and edited it a bit. The hills in the background are generated with 
the terrain editor (using the "mounds" function in the terrain editor and 
eroding it a bit).
I've generated hundreds of palm trees and scattered them over the beach and 
the sand dunes. I dropped them to the surface and deleted those which were 
too near (or on) the water.
The mountain is also made with the terrain editor in Vue. As it looked like 
a vulcano, I added some smoke. The smoke consists of several cloud spheres.

Finally, I rendered it in 800*600, using "Ultra" settings.
I used PSP to add my copyright and converted the file to JPG with JPEG optimizer.

(Note: You'll need Vue 3.1, in order be able to use the sources in the Zip file. 
Vue 3.0 won't work.)