TITLE: The Kilawea Iki
NAME: Ignacio Ramirez Paulino
COUNTRY: Uruguay
EMAIL: paulinos@adinet.com.uy
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kilawea.jpg
ZIPFILE: kilawea.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.01 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Terrain Maker, Moray 3.01 for Windows

RENDER TIME: 
    0 hours, 43 minutes, 47 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 150MHz, 24Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This is a view from the Kilawea Iki volcano. The Kilawea Iki
is located in Hawaii and has a constant "smooth" eruption that can be watched
from close. The main lobe can reach 300 meters in height.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    This scene contanins relatively few
objects in it.
Basically, the shape of the volcano and its crater is a height field wich I
created using the great "Terrain Maker". lowering, raising and applying erosion
to get the correct shape. In fact, there is no real volcano in the scene. The
height field only makes the crater, the river and its surrowndings (check out
the gif used to create the height field).
The complexity of the scene lies in the use of the HALOS. Each halo is contained
in ellipses wich in turn form the flames and the scattered dust around the
crater. Actually, there are four different halos defined. Three for the three
different intensities of flame, and one for the red hot dust. The most
difficult stage in the creation of this scene was the fine-tuning of the halo
parameters in order to obtain the desired effect. Some secondary effects arised
from the fact that PovRay cannot handle superimposed halos very well
(overlapping objects, each one containing its own halo) , and the multiple
halos (one object with more than one halo inside) are limited to one colour map
for all the halos, wich made it useless for my purposes.
The light from each of the flames is simulated by area lights scaled and colored
according to the size and color of each flame. There is no sun, so all the
light in this scene comes from the flames.
The Lava river is made from a layered texture called "magma" wich consists of
red-hot veins (onion pattern) on top of "cold" lava (not really very cold).
Finally the sky is also a layered texture wich tries to emulate the sky right
after the sun has gone down. Its a bozo pattern on top of a gradient pigment
pattern.

NOTE : Unfortunately, the high contrast that characterizes this scene doesn_t
suit well the JPG standard and the Lava veins in the river got some color
distortion on its edges, in the form of very thin white contours.