EMAIL: limdaepl@gmx.de NAME: Roman Reiner TOPIC: Fire and Ice COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: firelake COUNTRY: Germany RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.6.1 TOOLS USED: POVTree for the trees, fast clouds macro by Gilles Tran for the sky, photoshop6 for conversion and adding author’s information, and my bare hands ;-) RENDER TIME: 20 hours 30 minutes 1 second (73801 seconds) Render averaged 19.18 PPS over 960000 pixels plus approx. an hour for the background HARDWARE USED: Celeron 2.6 GHz, 640 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The sunset is a thief - For she has stolen from the coral trees Their redness - Leaving them black-stained That she Might wash her gold in ruby. -Billy McCarroll DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Lake The lake is a plane with blurred reflection done as described in the questions and tips section: http://tag.povray.org/povQandT/languageQandT.html#blurredreflection It is the part rendering slowest in the image. Sky For the sky I used the fastclouds macro by Gilles Tran. I found it quite difficult to worm a sunset sky out of it and I am still not completely satisfied with the result. I had a long battle with myself whether I should not just use an image background what would have been much easier to set up and would have added much to the photorealism of the image but on the other hand the image had suffered much from a raytracing artists point of view and therefore I decided against doing it. As a compromise I rendered the background separately and used it as wallpaper in the final rendering what speeded up the rendering a lot. Well... In fact it just didn't slow it down even more ;-) Land The land is a heightfield based on the wrinkles pattern perturbed a little with granite pattern and additional granite normal. The snow texture is trial and error. I guess it will not be useable in other scenes and/or with different lighting. Ice floes The ice floes are mainly a copy of the first heightfield translated a little up and scaled down vertically so that they follow the coast. Later I perturbed their height with a additional bozo pattern to get some variation in their shape. the texture is the same snow texture as used for the land but with crackle instead of granite normal. This is layered with a vertical gradient pattern to get a smooth changeover to the water surface. Trees For the trees I modified the POVTree's standard spruces shape to make it look more like a fir (more cone shaped) and layered the texture with a semitransparent bozo pattern to simulate snow. Only one tree is used but varied in size and orientation. I hope this is not too obvious :-) The planting algorithm uses a bozo pigment function that provides a threshold controlling whether a tree is planted or not. That results in a more credible arrangement with more and less dense regions. See source for more information. A total of 2000 trees had been planted in the scene.