TITLE: Transparent Beings
NAME: ANGELLA Franck
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: angella@goelette.tsi.u-bordeaux.fr
WEBPAGE: http://goelette.tsi.u-bordeaux.fr/perso_angella.html
TOPIC: GLASS
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fameduse.jpg
ZIPFILE: fameduse.zip
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0
RENDER TIME: About 3 days
HARDWARE USED: 
486DX33 for design
               SunSparc20 (64Mo) for final rendering

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
An underwater view of a little woody loading bridge
with two giant jelly fishes approaching a boat.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
My main idea was to create a picture with something transparent but natural.
Water was the first idea I had (ok, it was not hard to find such an idea,
but I had never worked on water before so it took me some time to render
what I wanted: transparent, reflective, filtrant and bumpy interface).
The main source light is a spotlight located above the water interface.
After that I added the loading bridge and the boat. As the scene was too dark,
I used an extra underwater source light with the shadowless keyword,
so that there are no shadows on the water interface and on the ground
due to the bridge. The ground is an heightfield. I used some ground fogs
too for a more realistic aspect.

Then I decided to add an organic transparent element: the jelly fish.
The entire animal is transparent with some iridescence. The head is a
simple merge between an half hollow thick sphere and a thin surface of
revolution. For the body of the animal I created a sort of hollow
transparent macaroni, then 200 copies of it were randomly scaled, rotated
and translated using a spatial density probability function to group
them at the right place. The filament tentacle are transparent too.
I used a 3D-parametric function to model them (made of sinusoids and
3rd order polynomials). Little cones follow the function in order to have
filaments that are more and more thin. Then I randomly changed the
function parameters to have different filaments.

