EMAIL: darwallace@earthlink.net NAME: David A.R. Wallace TOPIC: Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Pool of Tears COUNTRY: U.S.A. WEBPAGE: N/A RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (for JPEG conversion) RENDER TIME: 02:00:40 HARDWARE USED: AMD Duron 800, 512 MB DDR RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the middle of a vast desert, pock-marked with a huge crater, a volcano rises in the center. While in the throes of an immense eruption, the volcano ignores a pool glistening in an extinct mountain side tube. This pool was not formed by rain or an underground geyser, but by tears which can never fade even in the harshest sun. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is a much simpler image than I have attempted of late. It is made of the following components: 1. Land. Since isosurface landscapes were proving unreasonably slow to produce, I tried an image-based height field. Creating one in POV-Ray was not very hard, but the resolution had to be very high to get good results. The answer was a custom terrain.ini for huge, simple images for use as height fields. Getting a good texture involved a combination of turbulent image maps and a gradient texture map. I learned this trick during my aborted Fortress attempt. The result is not only good-looking but fast and I will seek even more detail in future. 2. Boulders. Once I had the terrain I could use the trace function to place objects on it. The boulders are agate-displaced isosurfaces but since they are individually small they don't disrupt the render the way a landscape might. They were placed in an include file generated by a macro. I set a maximum location height since these things were not likely to rest on the slopes. 3. Lava. I made the lava objects using a macro-based simulation which took drag and viscous stretching into account. The time to create the include file was extensive (13 hours for the current spray, 10,000 particles) but the resulting file had little impact on the parsing time (33 seconds, total). 4. Smoke. I think I found something big here. A very faint scattering media combined with a displacement isosurface to break up the outline of the cloud is a very potent combination that will be used again. It was also the slowest of the elements by a wide margin. 5. Pool. The object itself (an isosurface with a fresnel reflection and light absorption media) was a lot simpler than its placement. Landscape height fields cannot really be made to order very well; you have to make good use of the result. The same goes for the camera. 6. Skull. I just grabbed the object and its texture from my Cemetary project. It adds nicely to the sense of utter desolation and isolation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The POV Team for their excellent, and free, raytracing program. The Absolute Background Textures Archive for image-maps. The French 3dtextures.fr.st site for large, detailed image-maps.