TITLE: Dolphin
NAME: Andrew Swan
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: a.swan@ucl.ac.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~zcapr21
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: asdolph.jpg
ZIPFILE: asdolph.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRAY for Windows 3.1

TOOLS USED: 


RENDER TIME: 
    Many, many hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium MMX 233, 64Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A fairly simple and obvious idea, I'm afraid.  I didn't have the time or energy
to come up with anything more exciting, let alone actually make it.  Still, I'm
fairly pleased with the result, although I could do with finding a somewhat
less angular dolphin...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Back in the mists of time, I downloaded a free dolphin 3DS file for
experimenting with, and there it sat for years.  Anyway, I remembered I still
had the file, and converted it to a Povray .INC file using a little utility
called 3Dto3D (by Thomas Baier, '96).  Humble old MS-DOS Edit stripped the
unnecessary spaces out for me, losing many many KB off the filesize.  A quick
scale and rotate etc. got the dolphin into a reasonable size and orientation.

Having got the idea of looking at the dolphin underwater, with a beam of light
on it, the next thing was to create the water surface.  This took a little
while to get right, but is simple enough in the end.  One important aspect was
adding a "sky" - a blueish plane above the surface to make the water actually
look vaguely like water.

Then, all I did was to put the lightsource in, and make the media look alright. 
This took ages, as I am not an expert in such matters, and in the end I had to
make the seafloor actually slope up to avoid an unrealistic horizon.  As it is
it doesn't look entirely convincing.

Oh, and the bubbles.  I needed something more in the picture, and these seemed
reasonable.  Just a very simple macro.

And that's that.  If I ever get a better dolphin model, I will probably redo the
picture, but at low resolutions, it's not too bad.

I used PSP to add the unobtrusive copyright message at the bottom right. 
Unfortunately, JPEG encoding scrambled it a little, but hey, it's still
readable.

