TITLE: Shallow Water Channel, Ebb Tide
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gregj56590@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/gregjohn/animation.html
TOPIC: Stills
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: swcet.jpg
ZIPFILE: swcet.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Megapov 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 
    CorelDream3D, Win3D,sPatch

RENDER TIME: 
    27 h 31 m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Aptiva PII 450 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Image inspired by the Kursk tragedy and recent news about bringing up the Hunley
from the sea floor. The sadness of these events had me singing Thomas Dolby's
"One of our Submarines."  A line from the song, I believe is "shallow water
channel ebb tide."

I wanted to make an undersea image of someone discovering a sub on the sea
floor.  

Areas in need of improvement:
1) better explanation as to why a spotlight focused on the sub. (Original vision
was to have a scuba diver or rescue sub but ran out of time).
2) emitting media to make the sea colored instead of black.
3) better texture for normals on sub.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I got a submarine model off of the CorelDream3D CD. I exported it out to DXF and
then used Win3D to conert to POV.

Everything else is my creation.
1) Sea floor is an isosurface.
2) Shark and fish are sPatch-created bicubic patches.
3) "Sea" is actually two media, one scattering and one absorbing. If I had more
time to tinker, I should have combined these two into one media statement and
added another, emitting (or blue scattering?), to "color" the water.


