TITLE: Desert pioneers
NAME: Thomas de Groot
COUNTRY: Netherlands
EMAIL: t.degroot@inter.nl.net
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tdgdeser.jpg
ZIPFILE: tdgdeser.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Wings3D

RENDER TIME: 
    31 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Compaq Presario 7000T - Pentium III 1GHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Deserts are not dead areas. There are few places on Earth were life does not try
to find a foothold. There are always pioneers - plants or animals - that try to
colonize those empty wastes. Cacti are excellent survivors and pioneers.
This scene does not claim photo-realism. Rather, it tries to visualize the
concept of 'desert' and the encroaching life.
On the rocks in the forefront, the fossilized shadows of ripples millions of
years old, form a kind of counterpoint to the rippled sands of the dunes. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Two isosurfaces form the bulk of the landscape: one for the rocks, one for the
sand dunes (see the included scene file). In the background, a heightfield has
been used as a kind of mountain or giant dune.
The cacti come originally from Taschen's 500 3D-objects, volume 2. The original
3ds object was imported into Wings3D, where it was slightly changed, and
exported to POV-Ray as mesh2 format objects.
The sky was kept simple: a sphere for the background, and one for the clouds,
both suitably scaled to good proportions.
A ground fog was used. I experimented with media, but render times became too
prohibitive!
Especially radiosity was the origin of the very long render time (parsing took 6
seconds).