TITLE: Point Melancholy
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: melnchol.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows, Paint Shop Pro 6.0 (signature and image
compression only)

RENDER TIME: 
    approx. 1 1/2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 266, 128 mg RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  Enshrouded in fog, a solitary lighthouse stands at the edge of a stormy sea,
shining its mournful beam across the water, providing a beacon of hope to those
ships and sailors struggling to find their way home.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

  
  The mountains are a simple bump map heightfield, which turned out pretty well
except for some pixellation along the edges.  I used a skysphere to create a
dark, cloudy sky, although it's hard to make it out since it blends into the
fog so much.  The lighthouse is a simple lathe object combined with csg.  The
cottages and ship are also basic csg.  

  Continuing my experiments with fog, there is a two-layer blue-ish ground
fog... one layer covers is fairly transparent and covers the whole scene, while
the other is denser and stops about one third of the way up the mountains.  I
used media with a bump-mapped density to create the main white-ish fog, and a
media-filled cone to simulate the light from the lighthouse.  (This could use
some work... it's a little more solid-looking than I'd like it to be.)

  For the water, my friend Keven helped me with the math to come up with a
simple routine to generate a mesh with randomly-placed 'peaks' to simulate
choppy water.  The texture could probably use some work.

  The shoreline consists of a multi-pointed conic prism topped with a cubic
prism of the same shape but with a different texture.  The trees are all while
loops which use cylinders of random lengths to give a slightly different shape
to each one, and while they are not perfect, I think they are a decent
simulation of pine trees.  (And while it takes a while to render the
tree-covered parts of the scene, it doesn't take forever, unlike some of the
other techniques I attempted.)

  The two people in the scene (one in the water, and the other can barely be
made out... he's about to fall backwards over the edge of the ship just above
the rope ladder) are blob creations.  Not sure how well these turned out, but
for realism the ship needed something resembling a crew, at least!

  Most of the objects in the scene needed to be given a fairly high level of
ambient to keep them from fading completely into the fog.

  In closing, I'd again like to thank everyone who commented on my last entry
for their thoughts. If nothing else, I think this entry is at least an
improvement over my last one.


