EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
NAME: Robert Lee
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Ice Cave
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: POV 3.5
TOOLS USED: World Maker, IfranView, 
Windows Paint, BioWin, Little Gray Cells

RENDER TIME: about 15 hrs
HARDWARE USED: 1.7 Ghz Pentium on Windows XP

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Frozen Moment or Moment Frozen?
You decide.  The scene is set in a cave, adjacent
to an inter-mountain glacier.

Frozen Moment: This might be a picture of a frozen
moment.  The sudden onset of an ice age traps ancient
life forms in a frozen landscape forever.  Water,
in mid-drip, is frozen solid.  Cooling water vapor
condenses into fog and ice forms on the cave walls 
and floor.

Moment Frozen: This might be a picture of a moment
frozen in time.  As an ice age comes to an end, ancient
life forms begin to thaw as the ice recedes. The thawing
stalactite is caught in mid drip.  The thawing ice
forms an ice fog that settles to the cave floor.  Is 
the life form near the front of the cave responding
to sunlight?  

This is my third IRTC entry.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Terrain: I started with some mountains made with World
Maker, placed them in the background, and applied
a distant-mountain type texture.  These mountains were
reused from my previous entry.

Cave:  I created an image with MS Paint showing blobs
of black, white, and gray.  I created a second image
by inverting, taking the negative, of the first.  These
two images were massaged a bit and then turned into 
height fields and aligned, one above the other, to 
make a cave.  Most time was spent on creating a
realistic texture for the cave.  It has elements of rock
and ice.

Cave Floor:  The cave floor and snow field outside, is 
a box upon which the cave height fields sit.  The box 
is textured with an ice / snow gradient x texture.

Cave Fog: Cave fog is created by filling a hollow, 
transparent box with emission media. 

Stalactite: This is a sphere sweep object coated with the
cave texture. A second sphere sweep object, slightly
larger but the same shape as the first, is textured as
clear ice. A small sphere is appended to the end of 
the stalactite to form a drip.

Life Forms: The ancient life forms were created with
the program BioWin.  Output from BioWin, POV source code,
was incorporated into the scene and textures were added.   

Clouds: Being a meteorologist, I wanted the clouds to look
right. Thirty, hollow, scaled spheres were filled with 
emission and scattering media and combined into a blob object. 

Fog:  Ground fog was added to show moisture - condensing or
evaporating. 

Frozen Splash: The icy splash is the difference between a 
blob object, containing several sphere components, and a box
that is textured using a glass texture to make it look like
ice. 

Lighting: There is one point light source to light the outside
terrain.  There is an area light near the front of the cave 
shining in to create the soft shadows.  There are two very dim
fill lights.  One on the right and the other on the left near
the front of the cave to illuminate a bit of the cave not
directly illuminated by the area light. 

Radiosity: I used fairly high quality radiocity settings:                
        pretrace_start 0.08
        pretrace_end   0.005
        count 400   
        error_bound 0.1
        recursion_limit 5  
        media on
        normal on
        always_sample off
        save_file "CaveRad3"

IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.
