TITLE: Help, it's after us! NAME: Peter Murray COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ TOPIC: Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pdmbrgs.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh 68K FPU TOOLS USED: Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Briggs, Erwin & Collier (Smithsonian Institution Press 1994, ISBN 1-56098-364-7) GraphicConverter 2.5 (to crop the image and convert to JPG) RENDER TIME: Total Time: 5 hours 22 minutes 2.4 seconds HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh Centris 650 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An Anomalocaris swims after its small prey DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This wasn't anything like the ideas I'd been working on, but the computer I usually use suddenly stopped working, leaving me with only this 7-year-old computer; and with all my POV-Ray files for the village etc trapped on its internal disk, or on Zip disks I couldn't read on this computer. When I couldn't get the computer to work again, I looked desperately for a new IRTC Sea idea, and remembered the book about the Burgess Shale and life in the early Cambrian era, which I'd been looking at. I modelled some scenery meant to represent a small bit of the seabed 500 million years ago, with some randomly placed rocks, but a problem with my macro coding meant I decided to use some ground fog to represent the water. This has washed-out any detail of the sky, covered up the texture on the predator's fins, and failed to cover up the lack of distant detail! I modelled some of the creatures from the book. Anomalocaris is the large predator, about 50cm long. The small crawling creatures between the rocks are Wiwaxia (4cm long here), the ones rooted to the seabed are Dinomischus (about 3-4cm high), and the ones fleeing from the predator are Nectocaris (a mere 2cm long). The book gives all its measurements in metric units, making this the first of my IRTC entries to use both metric and Imperial measurements. That just confused me. Although I spent a while trying to find textures that looked good on the creatures, they're too small in the final scene, except for the Anomalocaris, which is posed so that you can't see that its back is darker than its underside. It was supposed to have been 800x600, but with an hour to go before the deadline, I didn't want to risk rendering it for any longer (the lights had flickered twice!). And :-( at some point in my test renders, I'd moved back from the main scene, and forgot to move the viewpoint back - it's fairly obvious that I'd only worked on the centre of this image, and you can hardly even see the small creatures being chased. I haven't included a zipfile - partly because all the code is rushed and unfinished, but mainly because the utility I'd need to use isn't on this machine. This reads like a list of excuses :-( . I'm fairly content with the way the creatures look, though they're too small to see well, and if I hadn't made the mistake with the camera, I'd have probably been content with the composition too. I'll probably re-render this after I've had some more sleep, and put it on my webpage.