TITLE: Pond Life
NAME: David Sharp
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dgsharp@indiana.edu
WEBPAGE: http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/
TOPIC: Insects
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pondlife.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Mac MegaPov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    Mac MegaPov

RENDER TIME: 
    one hour, 8 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PowerMac G3 400


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A picture of a pond, with lily pads, water lilies, fireflies, reeds,
mosquitoes, cat tails, and a giant water scavenger beetle.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Everything was hand-coded in POV-Ray. Nearly everything in the scene has
at least some random elements.

I'm new to this (this is the second picture
I've ever made) so I had to keep things simple, making everything out of
basic primitives CSG'd together.

I wrote a macro to generate a random patch of reeds and cat tails (each made
of simple cones, cylinders, etc). I couldn't quite fix the aliasing on the
reeds.

I did all the insects in one day (got a late start!). I used media for the
firefly butts, but never got the lighting to look quite how I wanted it.

I had macros to generate random "swarms" of mosquitoes and fireflies (randomly
lit up or not). The beetle is just a couple of primitive shapes CSG'd together.

The water lilies are randomly generated, and appear at any stage of being
open or closed. The lily pads are just circles with stretched square bites
taken out.

The pond floor is a height field. There is a sky plane covered with clouds,
which you can't really tell. (I had hoped to show the clouds reflected in the
water, but for some reason couldn't get them to show up.)

My code is an ugly and embarrassing collection of cheap hacks that weren't
done at all "the right way", I'm sure. ;) It also includes source to allow you
to compile it from different views for a stereo effect, but it didn't turn
out too impressive in stereo. Anyway. If you'd like to see my source, email me.

Thanks for letting me do the final rendering on your computer, Mom. :)

