EMAIL: stephansaalfeld@gmx.de
NAME: Stephan Saalfeld
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Touch
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.phenomene.de/somewhere (comin' soon)

RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: PaintShop Pro 7.04
RENDER TIME: 82:02:53
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 512MB DDR

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

It's one of the moments I ever wanted to freeze.
Suspicious halflight, absolute silence and a feeling of lonelyness.
It's the moment a few seconds after the long twig of the birch touched the water's surface.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Wall and castle:
Any wall is a height-field-csg based on the crackle-pattern computed with POV-Ray and modified in PaintShop (arcs, windows, noise etc.).
The Towers are such an height-field-csg splitted into 36 parts and placed around a cylinder by WHILE-statement. To increase the quality of the result for nearer towers you have to decrease the step-variable. It's splitted into more parts then and looks "rounder". I think it's been enough for the used distance.

Water:
In the far it's only a plane covered with granite bumps. The near water is a height-field based on a function that consists of 6 (x,z)-dependent sine waves. The origins of this waves are placed nearly exactly on the touch-points of the plants and wall with the surface.

Plants and trees:
1 1/2 years ago I wrote a plant creating macro with a lot of parameters (including gravity and light).
It's an easy recursive algorithm that does a lot of vector-calculations but I like the results:)
For the elements (trunk,branches), leafs and fruits/flowers it uses includable macros. So you can produce nearly any plant you want (like trees, palm-trees, fir-trees, flowers, gras, herbs etc.) with a little parameter-playing. Also nice roots are possible.
I used real leafs from a forest nearby (scanner) as height-field-modifier and for texturing. The base-form of the leafs is a height-field computed with POV-Ray. It's an (x,z)-function that looks somehow like the backside of a human:-). This base-form covered with a very transparent grey-scaled image of the leaf in PaintShop looks really well as leaf-surface. This surface is covered then with the scanned leaf.
The birches on the island use the birch_leaf too but in a lower level of detail.
Fir-trees ignore that they should have thousands of needles (nobody would see it).
I once rendered real firs with needles too, but that's really "memory-killing" and only necessary for near trees.
All trees on island are placed randomly in well defined areas.
The green "random" at the root of birch and flowers is really random-generated. There are 100 plants based on suitable parameters changed randomly between well defined limiting values. Every plant uses one of four available leafs.

I hope you like the image.
It is my first entry to the IRTC and everything (except some heightfields and textures modified with Paint Shop) is hand-coded in POV-Ray's text-editor.
A high-resoluted .png (2400x1200) is hidden in the .zip-file. That's great to watch the details:-)
All the source code is available in the .zip-file too. Up to now I didn't write a documentation for the macros, so write an e-mail, if you're interested in:-)
I wish you all merry christmas days and a happy new year.