TITLE: Shangri La
NAME: Christoph Hormann
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: chris_hormann@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: chasia.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5 beta 8

TOOLS USED: 

   Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro for bitmap editing/conversion
   Internal WinPov-Editor for coding

   Gilles Tran's maketree and makegrass macro
   http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm

   some self written tools (color maps, heightfield)


RENDER TIME: 
    ~12 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1 GHz, 512 Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The location of this picture is nowhere specific, but obviously it is
somewhere in central asia at fairly high altitude since the upper
parts of the background mountains are covered with snow.  It is also
very dry so trees are only growing near the river.

The title 'Shangri La' is probably best known from the novel
'Lost Horizon' written by James Hilton in 1935 and the movie based on
it.  In this story 'Shangri La' is the name of an utopian paradise-
like valley somewhere in the himalayan region.

Some links for those interested in more information on this:

The movie:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0029162

Background information including a lot of links and pictures
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/%7erajs/search.html




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The main idea for this scene was to model a complex landscape geometry
completely with isosurfaces.  Isosurface functions in POV-Ray 3.5 are
much more flexible than in megapov and increasing computer power
offers more possibilities too.

The whole terrain consists of 8 isosurface objects combined more or
less seamlessly.  The hills on the left use an image file for the
basis function that was created with external programs. The road on
the right is modeled with a spline function.

The river surface is made with isosurface objects too, the material
contains scattering media to simulate the muddy water.

The trees were all created with a customized version of Gilles Tran's
maketree macro.  I modified the code to generate the whole tree in
form of two large meshes which is much more efficient.  With
conventionally generated trees it would have taken far too much memory
to create that many trees.  Finally i also had to add some special
modifications to create the slim and long trees since maketree is
originally not very suited for that.

There are 6 different trees and bushes in the background part.  Only
the bushes further uphill in the foreground are created separately
and are especially formed according to the surrounding with help of
added intersection tests in the tree macro.

The grass in the foreground is made with makegrass and positioned
according to the surface slope.

In total there are only isosurfaces and meshes in this scene (apart
from the sky).

For the final render i used radiosity, but i'm not really content with
the results.  I originally had planned to use much higher quality
radiosity settings, but the render time did not permit...  So there is
only very few structure in the shadowed parts right now.

I will probably try some more things with the lighting next year. Also
a higher resolution version would surely be good since the scene
contains more than enough detail for this.

There is no 'making of' available right now due to the lack of time,
but i will try to put together some more details after the end of the
submission period.