TITLE: Compartmentalized Sea
NAME: Ben Weston
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tekf@ukonline.co.uk
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: partized.jpg
ZIPFILE: partized.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray for Windows v3.1


TOOLS USED: 

        POV-Ray editor


RENDER TIME: 

        6h 07m 24s


HARDWARE USED: 

        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The collector was feeling in a pacific mood today...

He went to the cabinet that held his collection of oceans. Selecting the
door to the pacific, he pulled the handle and released the sea into the
room. Before long the water had formed the horizon, just in time for a
picturesque sunset.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This rather surreal image grew out of a brainstorming session of things to 
do with the sea. The original idea was simply a cabinet full of cubes of
sea. After creating that scene I had the idea of opening one of the 
compartments and allowing the sea to pour out. This led logically enough 
to having the entire cabinet in the middle of the ocean, fuelling it 
(though I tried a few other ideas along the way). The sunset came from 
another image I'd been playing with for the sea topic, and it was sheer 
luck that the two colour schemes went so well together. I then moved the 
camera and changed the aspect ratio so you can 'read' the scene from left 
to right, i.e. the cabinet full of sea has an open door which is pouring 
water out to form a sea which flows off into the sunset (I deliberately 
made the picture too big to fit in (most) web browser windows, so you have 
to scroll across, I like it that way). The final touch was adding the 
splash. Details of how I modelled the various components are as follows:

The entire scene was created in POVray 3.1's scripting language, including 
all textures, heightfields, models, etc. I'm a programmer by trade, and so 
this approach suits me well. (I've tried to include all the relevant 
source files in the zip file, as well as an explanation of how to render 
it, 'cause it really bugs me when I download the source for an image but I 
can't make it work! I also included a close up of the splash, because it 
looks pretty cool)

THE CABINET is done with a couple of while loops, one to create shelves 
and one to create "struts" (the vertical shelves), all of which are just 
boxes, plus another box on the back of the cabinet. the visible sides of 
the shelves are texured with wood, but the interior of each cupboard is 
coloured in a white to black gradient, to give nicer reflections in the 
water. The doors are also boxes, with cylinders taken out to add a bit 
more detail, made out of a slightly reflective, mostly see through, pale 
green-blue material.

THE WATER comes in four basic types:
The sea surface was created first, it's just a flat plane in highly 
reflective, opaque, dark green with a bump map on it. The bump map is 
POV's crackle texture with two layers of turbulence at different scales 
(using the warp command).
The water in the boxes is formed from a height field generated by the same 
texture as used by the bump mapping!
The pouring water is a julia fractal, rotated and scaled to the 
appropriate position, with a cylinder differenced from the underside to 
stop bits of it passing through lower cupboards.
The splash was added last, and consists of a blob round a particle system. 
The particle system is done entirely with #while loops and just positions 
a bunch of spheres as if they've been fired up and out from a ring around 
the point where the pouring water enters the sea. The material is the same 
as the pouring water, except I lowered the refractive index and made the 
colour white and more transparent, because the splash was looking too 
"heavy".

THE SKY consists of 3 gradients layered on top of each other; a blue one, 
a thinner green one, and an even thinner red one. All three gradients fade 
to white at the horizon, and transparent at the other end so the colour 
only becomes apparent between the two extremes. The blue bit is what gives 
the dark ripples on the water, as it reflects the top of the sky sphere.

THE SUN is just lens flare, using sunset1 from nkflare.inc. It looks a 
little blurry because of the focal blur.

I added FOCAL BLUR to the final image, but only a tiny amount. The lens 
flare is created so close to the camera that any significant amount of 
blurring makes it vanish all together! But the subtle blur was enough to 
slightly soften the horizon and the lens flare, and sorted out some 
interference patterns on the distant sea. It also "cleans" the rest of the 
image, removing dotty patterns that were arising from all the small 
details in the scene by taking more samples per ray.


