TITLE: A strange Valley
NAME: Marcin Brodziak
COUNTRY: Poland
EMAIL: marcin@no.win.pl
TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: valley.jpg
ZIPFILE: valley.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov Ray 3.6.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Pov Ray 3.6.1

RENDER TIME: 
    about 14hrs (wasn't rendering on my own machine, got no stats)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1700+

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Warm, spring green is mixed with cold winter. Trees taken out of the most
intriguing animated short stories. River with the freshest and cleares water
ever found... Oh... why is it so blurred? Hmm... it must be a dream ;)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I coded simple recursive L-trees in two versions: brownish with greenish leaves
and brown-white with snow. They're put on a grid with cells 2 by 2 and a random
displacement of 0.5 or something like that. There's a special function that
decides if the tree should be green or white - the fact that some green trees
are on the right is not an accident. 

Then I chose a function (two variables, based on sinus) to make the valley.
Valley is modelled with single-color textured triangles. I wanted to use smooth
triangles but I didn't have time to compute appropriate derivates by hand. For
x > 0 valley is white and for the rest is green. I used crand to make the grass
and snow look better, which worked in preview, but didn't in the final image
due to focal blur. I hoped it will be visible at least in the middle of the
image.

I didn't take care to make the trees look perfect I just wanted to make them
look tree-alike, to make it look unnatural. To support the atmosphere of a
dream I added some focal blur, but I suppose I gave it too much. 

Snow is trivial - just a few white balls randomly placed around the scene.