EMAIL: sshelby@shelbyvisiion.com
NAME: Steve Shelby
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Tornado
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: POVray
TOOLS USED: All of the modelling and scene construction was done with Moray. All images for image maps and df3 density file were created with Corel PhotoPaint8. I used tga2df3.exe to create the df3 file, and 3dwin4 to convert .3ds to .udo for Moray. 
RENDER TIME: 1 hour and 53 minutes.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium4 2ghz, 256mb ram.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A tornado of epic proportions looms just over the horizon. A lone driver flees for his life.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I have heard of monster tornadoes that cut a swath as much as a mile wide. This is what I was attempting to portray here. It was much more difficult than I ever expected. In order for the tornado to look really big, it has to look far away, which requires putting a lot of ground in front of it, and making other things in the scene look very small. I used a very wide angle camera to increase the effect of distance and perspective.
I kept the scene as simple as possible, mostly because I wanted to portray the austerity of the Great Plains, and the loneliness of the situation. There are some fine details I could have added, but simply did not have the time. As it is, I estimate that I spent at least 100 hours on it. 
The hardest part was the creation of the tornado itself, and the cloud background. It took me a month of experimenting to come up with something satisfactory. I experimented with media first, and that's what the cloud background is. It is a thin box filled with media using absorption, emission, and scattering colors, and density wrinkles. I could not get media to work for the tornado. I finally settled on a density file. I found a little program called "tga2df3" on Gilles Tran's website, which made it possible to create my own density file for the tornado. The tornado is in another box directly in front of the cloud box, and directly behind the ground. There is also a constant fog in the scene which adds a lot of atmospheric effect.
The ground is a rectangular mesh with UV mapped texture. The road is a flattened cylinder with image mapping. I got the car and trees from 3d Cafe; they were free downloads with no mention of who created them. I would have made my own models if I'd had the time. They were .3ds files, which I converted to .udo for Moray. I added the lights to the car, using two spotlights and media-filled cones. 
The electric wires were yet another challange. I had never played with antialiasing at all, except to turn it on or off, but the wires forced me to learn a little more. I had to change the antialias depth from the default "1" to "3" in order to make the wires show up completely. This increased render time from just a few minutes to almost two hours, but it also vastly improved the general quality of the entire image.