TITLE: River Mill
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: no13@no13.net
WEBPAGE: www.no13.net
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 13oldtek.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Arboretum for the trees. Home made VB6 stuff for colours and colour
maps. Plant Studio

RENDER TIME: 
    5 hours final. 3 hours sky.

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4, 512 Mb Ram. XP pro

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A fortified river mill. At the time the topic was announced I was reading a
scifi novel about time travel involving archaelogists. Part of what they were
investigating was a fortified river mill in france. I decided to render such a
mill but I moved the setting to the netherlands as I had been keen for some
time to create an image in the style of the Dutch painter Vermeer.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

950f the image has been hand coded. The only code generated by other programs
were the trees, created with Arboretum, and the small shore plants created in
plant studio.

The sky is a media sky rendered separately and then used as a background image.
This speeded up overall rendering time and eliminated some weird artefacts
generated by some extra light sources used in the final image.

All the hand coding was done using macros with variables so that I could move
the main building around, change the radius and facets of the paddle wheel etc.
This helped in acheiving the final compesition I desired.

To speed things up I also made some quick and dirty VB6 programs for making
colour maps and picking colours.

The scene was first modelled using simple solid, details and textures were then
added to create the final buildings. A lot of time was spent on adding dirt and
marks to the buildings.

The water is a media box with a complex normal and variable reflection. I set
the media to a muddy blue/brown. Similar to a river just after a flood or heavy
rain. This was in keeping with the colour tonality of the overall image.

The lighting was set low, with a red gold tint, similar to an early morning sun.
I low intensity infill light and radiosity filled out the lighting for the rest
of the scene.