TITLE: Encounters

NAME: Stefano Tessarin
COUNTRY: Italy

EMAIL: s.tessarin--at--tin.it
WEBPAGE: N/A

TOPIC: BIG!!
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: encounte.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 
    AC3D


RENDER TIME: 



HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP 3000+ RAM 768MB




IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Once ago I read on a since magazine about what kind of animals should we find in
the abyss. I would try to imagine such a scene like that.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

To achieve a good underwater filing I used different POV-ray features. I put the
whole scene into a hollow sphere with a bluish pigment and a low transmit
value, then set the fog with the same rgb value below the objects just to loose
definitions of distant objects. Then I added an blue ambient value. I managed
with several blue rgb values, but it seemed to be very difficult to me to
achieve a good compromise about abyss darkness and visibility of the scene. The
value I choose isn't really an abyss ambient blue, but deadline approached very
fast! I tried to add also scattering media and photons, but rendering time
warped to infinity so I had to (sadly :( ) give up!

Submarine is simple a CSG object.

Shell is a supershape mesh made by a macro under pov-ray. If you wanna know
something more about supershape try
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/supershape/

Tentacles are cones mesh generated (also under pov-ray) with the axis of each
cone following a random spline.

I didn't have much time to model a good fish so I cheated a bit. I found in
Internet a tropical fish picture, using AC3D I draw a polyline following its
contour, then build a mesh triangulating the points of the polyline with as
image_map the actual image, so... they are in fact completely flat!! I then
placed randomly almost 300 fishes (doesn't look isn't it?) in the scene.

NOTE: I didn't include any zip file (source) since all the objects but the
submarine are meshes and the .inc files are huge (more than 20Megs total) and
it should be totally useless give an empty scene.

