TITLE: The sniper NAME: Jonathan Scudder COUNTRY: Norway/UK EMAIL: jonathas@ifi.uio.no WEBPAGE: www.scudder.no TOPIC: Warfare COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 Beta TOOLS USED: Pen + paper, Photoshop RENDER TIME: 1 hr 35 mins 35 secs HARDWARE USED: 1.4 GHz Athlon, 512MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Finally, after suffering at the hands of the sniper for three days, the waiting pays off. The sniper is holed up at the old farmhouse, troops surrounding the building at a safe distance. Moving stealthily, the counter-sniper crouches by a tree, scanning the windows of the building for a clear shot of the enemy... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The wooden planks/window frame: All the wooden surfaces were created by rendering an image of a plain surface with normal wrinkles which are heavily stretched in one direction. These images were then size and used to create the planks as height fields. Colouring is down to procedural textures: different browns at different depths of the wood, and a bozo layer of moss on top. The pipe: Simple copper water pipe, lots of small bumps on the surface. Would have liked to add much more detail (old cloth wrappings, grime, etc.), but ran out of time. The wall: This is a heightfield based on an image created in Photoshop (although any paint program would have done), so the cracks, flakes and bullet holes are actual surface features. The colouring is just an image map. The interior walls are also created in the same way (was originally planning a scene in the house), but the texture is hardly visible in the dark interior... The gun: A fairly simple model of an H&K MSG90 sniper rifle, reference pictures obtained from the web. The muzzle flash is an elongated sphere filled with emitting media, with two densities: a cylinder along the fire path, and a gradient away from the barrel. This gives the flash a flare which tapers off fairly quickly. The sniper: The partially hidden sniper is a simple collection of spheres etc., grouped to giver the impression of someone hunched over behind the gun. Only part of the head and a shoulder are slightly visible - after all, a sniper wouldn't sit in the open :-) The grass: Credit to Gilles Tran for his grass macro! The focal blur created some strange effects in the grass... The tree: To save render time on the final image, I first rendered a simple tree alone, then manipulated this images to end up with an image map silhouette of the tree. This is the semi- transparent texture of a box right in front of the camera, and focal blur is used to give the impression of a scope/binoculars. The blur didn't really come out as I had hoped, but anyway... That's all!