EMAIL: s.tessarin--at--tin.it

NAME: Stefano Tessarin

TOPIC: BIG!!

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Encounters

COUNTRY: Italy

WEBPAGE: N/A

RENDERER USED: povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: AC3D

RENDER TIME: 

HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ RAM: 768MB 



IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Once ago I read on a since magazine about what kind of animals should we find in the abyss. I would try to imagine such a scene like that.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
To achieve a good underwater filing I used different POV-ray features. I put the whole scene into a hollow sphere with a bluish pigment and a low transmit value, then set the fog with the same rgb value below the objects just to loose definitions of distant objects. Then I added an blue ambient value. I managed with several blue rgb values, but it seemed to be very difficult to me to achieve a good compromise about abyss darkness and visibility of the scene. The value I choose isn't really an abyss ambient blue, but deadline approached very fast! I tried to add also scattering media and photons, but rendering time warped to infinity so I had to (sadly :( ) give up!

Submarine is simple a CSG object.

Shell is a supershape mesh made by a macro under pov-ray. If you wanna know something more about supershape try http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/supershape/

Tentacles are cones mesh generated (also under pov-ray) with the axis of each cone following a random spline.

I didn't have much time to model a good fish so I cheated a bit. I found in Internet a tropical fish picture, using AC3D I draw a polyline following its contour, then build a mesh triangulating the points of the polyline with as image_map the actual image, so... they are in fact completely flat!! I then placed randomly almost 300 fishes (doesn't look isn't it?) in the scene.

NOTE: I didn't include any zip file (source) since all the objects but the submarine are meshes and the .inc files are huge (more than 20Megs total) and it should be totally useless give an empty scene.