TITLE: The Liedenbrock Sea
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmirtc1.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmirtc1.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 

    Moray 3.1 (material editor and bezier patch tool)
    Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (for height_field and jpg conversion)
    Graph paper, pencil, calculator


RENDER TIME: 
    17 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The vast subterrannean sea imagined by Jules Verne in his classic
novel "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". Discovered by Professor
Otto Liedenbrock, his cousin Axel, and their Icelandic guide Hans, the
sea carries them 600 leagues beneath the surface of the Earth - from
below Iceland to under the central Mediterrannean. Filled with all
manner of vegetation and prehistoric creatures, this is an imaginary
world within our own world.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Having discovered POV-Ray mid-January, I quickly realised how much fun
raytracing is and decided to motivate myself by entering the IRTC.
Science fiction supplying many obvious ideas for images under this topic,
I turned away from space-oriented works to the first SF book I ever read.
From there, the obvious image was the great underground sea envisaged by
Verne.

All the code was typed by hand except for a few small pieces generated
by Moray, as noted below. The zip file contain all the source code, plus
a scan of the dinosaur sketch I did to create the blobs.

The cavern itself is an inversed sphere squashed flat and greatly
elongated in the direction of the view. Moray's material editor was used
to tweak the colour_map values for the rocky texture. Inside the cavern
is a slightly smaller scaled sphere textured with the glowing fungus and
glow-worms (well, they were meant to be glow-worms, but it turned out in
the final render that it just looks like yellowy fungus), and transparent
elsewhere.

The ground is a height_field, hand-drawn in Paint Shop Pro. I used the
same rock texture as the cavern. The cloud layer is a semi-transparent bozo
pattern plane. For the water I wanted to do something really good, but
ended up just doing two layered planes, a mostly transparent one with
a wave normal pattern layered over a greenish one. The impression of
depth isn't really good. I also wanted to add spray, but ran out of time.

The mushrooms were modelled with a surface of revolution for the top,
attached to a segment of a torus for a slightly bent stalk. A macro call
controls size, placement, and the shape of the top to reflect differing
maturity.

The aurora is made of three aurora "primitives" I defined in an include
file. Each is a thick sine-curve shaped prism, transparent and filled
with an emission medium described by two density patterns and a density
colour_map.

The dinosaur is a generic ornithomimid therapod, based on species like
ornithomimus and dromiceiomimus, except with teeth. The body is a blob
with many components, coded and adjusted by hand. A squashed superquadric
ellipsoid is subtracted for the mouth, and conical teeth added. The eyes
are simply spheres with a radial colour_map and some highlights. The skin
texture is a double layer on the major body blob components, the second
layer meant to provide a fade from the rich colour of the back to a pale
underside, but it didn't really work as well as I'd hoped.

The pterosaurs are modelled after the species pteranadon, with the crest
on the back of the head. The wings are bezier patches created in Moray,
to which I unioned another hand-created blob for the body. The model is
much simpler than the dinosaur, since most of the pteranadons are in the
distance.

Unfortunately, the sheer size of Verne's underground sea meant that I
had to shrink it dramatically to fit interesting details into this
image. A portrayal true to the novel would have looked much like a
normal seaside, with the rocky cavern roof and walls invisibly distant.

To convey the sense of distance, I added a small amount of focal blur,
which really does improve the image, but multiplied the final render time
by about four times!

If I had the time I would have liked to add the water spray mentioned
above, and tone down the colouration of the rock in the foreground a
bit. Some fog in the distance would be nice too.

