TITLE: Cold shapes Hot, Hot shapes Cold
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Fire & Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 1volcano.jpg
ZIPFILE: 1volcano.zip
RENDERER USED: 

	MegaPOV 1.2.1

TOOLS USED: 

	MegaPOV editor
	Photoshop (to stitch together partial renders and add copyright)
	Irfanview (to convert to jpg)
	OpenOffice.org Writer (for this text)
 
RENDER TIME: 

	top section: 4d 15h
	bottom section: 2h 54m

Note – due to severe time constraints the bottom section used a lower quality smoke effect, since it only appears in shadows and some very bumpy reflections. This is totally representative of how the scene looks if rendered as one (I did a lower-res version for comparison), but if I hadn't done this I would have missed the deadline by several days!


HARDWARE USED: 

	Pentium 4 3.2GHz 2GB RAM (top section)
	Athlon XP 3200+ 2.22GHz 2GB RAM (bottom section)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Hot shapes cold – an icy mountain being remodelled by the volcanic forces that originally created it.

Cold shapes hot – lava spews forth from an undersea vent, instantly solidifying on the outside when it touches the cold sea, only to crack open and expand further and solidify again, forming strange structures known as pillow lava.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Is snow Ice? Is lava Fire? Hmm...

The biggest thing here for me was the concept. I decided “fire & ice” was too specific so, like the IRTC topic notes suggested, I generalised to “hot & cold”. But that didn't give me any great ideas either so I decided “&” was too ambiguous (all my ideas consisted of something hot next to something cold!). Instead I started brainstorming by inserting random verbs between hot & cold, here's a few examples:
	cold within hot: a fridge, or vice-versa a fire in an igloo.
	cold defeats hot: Scott dying in the Antarctic.
	hot pulls cold: the sun's gravity pulling a comet (this was an alternative image I was working on for this round).

Finally I settled on the most unusual one I could think of:
	cold shapes hot: convection currents, a hammer beating a molten horseshoe, memory metal, molten lava flows out beneath the sea surface.
And later I combined that last one with its reverse “hot shapes cold”.

That's just a little insight for anyone who's interested in my creative thought process!


As for technical details, I've provided full source and the massive final render time afforded me plenty of time to go through it and comment it nicely! So if you want to know details download that, otherwise I'll just catalogue everything briefly for the semi-casual reader:

volcano – isosurface, turbulence applied to a smooth curved cone shape

smoke – media, turbulence applied to sphere, renders s...l...o...w...

lava flows – blobs, procedurally placed by rolling down the volcano

flying lava – blob particle system, they collide with volcano and leave little glowing streaks.

pillow lava (under-sea) – blobs with lots of turbulence on texture, procedurally placed

mountains – height fields from pov's wrinkle pattern

snow – just a texture, based on slope angle and elevation

clouds – 2 planes with different colours of the same pattern to fake 3D appearance

air – media, had problems with fog vs the smoke, so I switched to this

sea – height field, from granite pattern

sea material – media used for tint, fog, and fake media caustics

heat ripples – bumps on the wall of water facing us, the water's refraction makes this look like heat ripples.

steam bubbles – spheres of white media with ior 0, lined up by hand with hot bits of pillow lava.

sea floor – isosurface

steam – turbulence on a cylindrical media, placed by hand to line up with lava rivers cutting through snow

lens effects – using megapov's post-processing to tone-map, vignette, and add slight colour dispersion, to give a more photographic feel to the scene.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

This scene hit a massive crunch as the deadline approached, because it became clear that my last tweaks to the smoke had doubled the render time to around 4 days, with only 7 days left until the competition deadline, and I still hadn't started the steam, bubble, and water-media effects I wanted! I bashed them together over 2 days mostly while at work, so I'd like to thank my bosses for either not noticing or turning a blind eye to that!

Also, a big thanks to folks on the pov newsgroups, a lot of things in the scene were suggested by people in response to my early WIP posts on povray.binaries.images.


One last thing, I've gathered all the work-in-progress renders for this scene and put them on a page on my website, so you can see how it all came together:
http://evilsuperbrain.com/gallery/wip/volcano_wips/index.php


Thanks,
Tek