EMAIL: chris_hormann@gmx.de NAME: Christoph Hormann TITLE: Shangri La TOPIC: Spirit of Asia COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: chasia.jpg ZIPFILE: none COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/ 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.