TITLE: Mired
NAME: Antoine Valentim
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: bumblebee@globalserve.net
WEBPAGE: http://web.globalserve.net/~bumblebee/ecclesia/ecclesia.htm
TOPIC: Insects and Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mired.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    Paul T. Dawson's Meshtree macro, The GIMP (JPEG conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    about 10 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 433

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A robot tank whose design was inspired by the insect world has, while crossing
an expanse of forest, become stuck in the mire at the edge of a marshy area. 
For a while, it struggled to escape, but in vain.  Eventually its power ran
out, and there it remains.

Meanwhile, on the water's surface, various real insects go about their
business...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The land is a heightfield made with MegaPOV's pattern image type; it's granite
with a little turbulence.  I found this a pretty easy way of making a
heightfield, since you can use POV itself to adjust characteristics of the
heightfield, rather than having to modify an image using some other software.

The water is a big reflective box.  It has some transparency, but I wanted to
keep it minimal, since I thought the marshy water would be better if it were
full of algae and stuff like that (this is why I tinged it slightly green). 
The water's surface normal is a crackle that is subdivided into two different
types of granite.  I did this to simulate the way that sometimes, on the
surface of a relatively still body of water, the wind will cause a few isolated
patches of water to develop small waves or ripples.  The effect I was going for
can be seen at the very bottom of the image.

The trees are made with Paul T. Dawson's Meshtree macro.  I simplified the
complexity of the trees a little, since they would be viewed from far away and
so the trunk and branches didn't need too much detail.  I made three different
trees, one green, one orange and one red, and then made several thousand copies
of each and randomly placed them on the heightfield using MegaPOV's trace
function to determine how high up to place them (and to avoid placing trees in
the water).

The reeds in the water are just green triangle meshes, also placed using the
trace function, but this time keeping the reeds near the shore and in the water
(for the most part).

The sky was something I came across by accident.  I had a big gray granite
sphere as the sky, but then I decided to try adding another granite sphere
inside it, with some parts transparent and some not, adding to the clouds'
texture.  The result looks quite good, I think. 

There's a fog that blends into the sky color, and helps to give some depth to
the landscape.    
A little above the surface of the water, I've added a few thousand insects,
which happen to be little black spheres (once again using the trace function to
figure out where the water was).  The spheres had to be made big enough to be
visible, but small enough that they could be mistaken for insects.

Finally, the big robot insect is made from a prism, spheres, cylinders, cones,
and a blob (the "tail" section).  The silvery texture is based on one of the
chromes in metals.inc, but I added a layer that simulates rust patches (based
on the crackle pattern).  The guns sticking out of the robot's "mouth", as well
as certain sections of the legs, use a darkened metal texture without any rust
added.  I used MegaPOV's vtransform function to figure out where to place the
various sections of the legs.  I varied the angles at which the legs are bent,
and tilted the entire robot to make it look like it was sinking into the mud at
the edge of the water.

All in all, I like the way this image turned out.  It has a nice melancholy
feeling to it.