TITLE: Help, it's after us!
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmbrgs.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh 68K FPU


TOOLS USED: 

    Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Briggs, Erwin & Collier
    (Smithsonian Institution Press 1994, ISBN 1-56098-364-7)
    GraphicConverter 2.5 (to crop the image and convert to JPG)


RENDER TIME: 

    Total Time: 5 hours 22 minutes   2.4 seconds


HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh Centris 650


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    An Anomalocaris swims after its small prey

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This wasn't anything like the ideas I'd been working on, but
the computer I usually use suddenly stopped working, leaving
me with only this 7-year-old computer; and with all my POV-Ray
files for the village etc trapped on its internal disk, or on
Zip disks I couldn't read on this computer.

When I couldn't get the computer to work again, I looked
desperately for a new IRTC Sea idea, and remembered the book
about the Burgess Shale and life in the early Cambrian era,
which I'd been looking at.

I modelled some scenery meant to represent a small bit of
the seabed 500 million years ago, with some randomly placed
rocks, but a problem with my macro coding meant I decided to
use some ground fog to represent the water.  This has
washed-out any detail of the sky, covered up the texture on
the predator's fins, and failed to cover up the lack of distant
detail!

I modelled some of the creatures from the book.  Anomalocaris
is the large predator, about 50cm long.  The small crawling
creatures between the rocks are Wiwaxia (4cm long here), the
ones rooted to the seabed are Dinomischus (about 3-4cm high),
and the ones fleeing from the predator are Nectocaris (a mere
2cm long).  The book gives all its measurements in metric
units, making this the first of my IRTC entries to use both
metric and Imperial measurements.  That just confused me.

Although I spent a while trying to find textures that looked
good on the creatures, they're too small in the final scene,
except for the Anomalocaris, which is posed so that you can't
see that its back is darker than its underside.

It was supposed to have been 800x600, but with an hour to go
before the deadline, I didn't want to risk rendering it for
any longer (the lights had flickered twice!).  And :-( at
some point in my test renders, I'd moved back from the main
scene, and forgot to move the viewpoint back - it's fairly
obvious that I'd only worked on the centre of this image, and
you can hardly even see the small creatures being chased.

I haven't included a zipfile - partly because all the code is
rushed and unfinished, but mainly because the utility I'd need
to use isn't on this machine.

This reads like a list of excuses :-( .  I'm fairly content
with the way the creatures look, though they're too small to
see well, and if I hadn't made the mistake with the camera,
I'd have probably been content with the composition too.  I'll
probably re-render this after I've had some more sleep, and
put it on my webpage.

