TITLE: Rock Garden of the Gods
NAME: Paul Vaughan
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bcooper761@aol.com
TOPIC: Garden
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: godgardn.jpg
ZIPFILE: godgardn.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    Povray 3.1e for Windows 95 


TOOLS USED: 

    Paint Shop Pro ........ .tga --> .jpg
                               ......... adjust hue & contrast of image_map
   Teragen ........ Landscape creation program (height mesh plus height and
slope dependent textures)
   Wilbur ......... Used to convert from Teragen height data to Povray triangle
mesh
   Crossroads ...... Pov .inc file to .dxf so;
      Wct2Pov ..... >dxf to triangle mesh (both normal and smooth)
   

RENDER TIME: 

    33 hrs  ( a=0.2)  / Clouds took the longest


HARDWARE USED: 
    386DX / 33Mhz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    I know this looks like it should be submitted to a "landscape" theme, but
this is how I got here:
    When I found out that the theme was "garden" I wasn't particularly excited,
but then it came to
      me, ...  the idea of a Japanese rock garden. From what I've read, it's
been described as a way to
      bring the beauty of nature into the crowded life style of their small
island. For some reason, I
      then had an image of "Devil's Post Pile" as I last saw it .... and then a
little bit more down
     contemplation lane, it came to me ... Why not a rock garden as the gods
would do it with a
     whole planet to play with.        


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    Landscape:  The landscape was designed in Teragen including height and slope
dependent textures.
                           Teragen generates a 3d view from the parameters
chosen. The saved elevation data was
                           converted to Povray smooth_triangle mesh using
Wilbur. Unfortunately, the normals were
                           all unit vectors along the positive x-axis. So, I
loaded the mesh into Crossroads and output
                           as a dxf file so I could load it into Wctv2pov and
produce smooth triangles. The background
                           looks best with normal triangles and the foreground
needs smooth, so the smooth mesh
                           was skinned over the rough and the background smooth
triangles were removed by hand
                           from the inc file. To create an image_map for the
landscape as created in Teragen, I
                           took a shot from above, centered on the origin and
with maximum possible zoom to
                           flatten the perspective to a near 2-d view. Some
tweaking of hue and contrast was done
                          with PSP to get the look I wanted.
    Moon: Sphere with applied bump_map and image_map derived from NASA survey
data. Zero ambient,
                         full diffuse so main "sun" light illuminates.
    Clouds: Multi-layered planes each with a "cloud" pattern. Idea shamelessly
lifted from "19141918" 
                        by Ian Shumsky who got it from "Canyon" by Jaime
Piqueres
    Tree & Eagle: Stock mesh objects.


