TITLE: The Ice Mine
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: icemine.jpg
ZIPFILE: icemine.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 RC 2



TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
         Paintshop Pro (to add copyright)



RENDER TIME: 


         1 day 7 hours



HARDWARE USED: 


        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The Ice Mine lies on a distant planet...

We call it "The Ice Mine" not because of it's contents, which are in fact
precious minerals, but because of the harshness of it's location. This photo
shows trains carrying minerals from the mine to a transporter ship, so that
they can be carried to manufacturing plants in more hospitable climes. The mine
is behind us, further up the hill the photographer is stood on.

Permanent sub-zero temperatures produce hostile conditions for those that work
here. Though it's not too cold, as can be seen by the presence of snow flakes
which can only occur in certain temperature ranges.

Viewing tip: I've found this image actually looks very good when you zoom in on
it. There's a lot of details that you just don't notice when the image is it's
normal size! Or maybe this just means my monitor's broken!? :)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This was another round that I decided not to enter, and then changed my mind
after coming up with some neat effects. Note: all textures, objects and effects
in this scene were created with povray.

A number of things combined to form the basis of this: Firstly, a couple of
people said my links image in the previous round had a sci-fi art feel.
Secondly, I had an idea bouncing round my head about making simple objects look
more convincing by using procedural detailing on them. And thirdly, I saw some
pictures by the sci-fi artist Chris Foss, which seemed to bring it all
together.

Anyway, this lead to an experiment, where I created a ball, textured it with a
complex layered texture using the cells pigment and some object textures to
write blocks of text. I also built an aerial and a docking hatch, and spread
them randomly over the object. This looked cool so I changed the underlying
shape to something a bit more elaborate, and that was pretty much how the red
and blue ship was created!

The trains are based on superellipsoids. The bulk of the work on these went on
refining the algorithm used for the ship into a slightly more useful include
file (though I never found time to retro-fit this onto the ship). Also the code
to lay trains along a spline projected onto the ground using the trace function
took a fair bit of work, as did the tank tracks (which are still incomplete but
the blur mostly hides that).

Other objects in the scene: the snow flakes are a mesh object, containing 100000
flakes within a box near the camera, the effect of distant flakes is acheived
using some turbulent fog. The ground is a couple of isosurfaces, and to my
surprise is the slowest element of the scene (when replaced by a plane the
scene renders more than 3 times quicker!). The piles of minerals in the train
carts are arranged using a macro I created to pile stuff in boxes (it's not
finished yet but it looks good enough for this image). The colour of the
mineral was picked in isolation from the rest of the scene, and so looks a bit
wierd, but I kinda like it.

I've put a few fake photographic effects into the scene (all done with pov of
course). There's focal blur, obviously, which improved the look of the scene a
lot but unfortunately I can't afford the time to trace it with more blur
samples so it's a bit noisy. To acheive the other photo effects I encased the
camera in a hollow sphere. The sphere has a transmit value greater than 1 to
stretch the contrast values within the scene. It has a slight red tint towards
the top left of the picture and blue to the bottom right, as well as a crand
finish to add noise to the image though that was toned down a lot when I put
the blur in. The camera also has a normal statement, to slightly distort the
image meaning that there's no clinically straight lines in it.

For the record, I've been doing a lot of overtime at work. working 9am to 8pm
most days and some weekends! This means that most of this image was produced by
somebody very tired and overworked, so it probably has dozens of mistakes I've
not noticed! Nonetheless I'm very happy with the result, there's not much I'd
improve even if I had time. I'm very keen to find out what people think,
because I'm simply too exhausted from work to really form a detailed opinion
myself! :)

Cheers

Tek

