TITLE: Ducks on Parade
NAME: D. Larson
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: turbosi@earthlink.net
WEBPAGE: http://turbosi.net
TOPIC: Forces of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: duckies.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    POVTree, Anim8or, Terragen, World Machine, PoseRay

RENDER TIME: 
    31Hrs, 33Mins, 16Secs (1280x1024)

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD 1700, 1024Meg memory

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Ducks on Parade. or The Call of Nature

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image was just an idea that popped into my mind.  Along with  the
twist on reality I wanted a strong interplay between the bright yellow
of the rubber ducks and the subtle  fall tones of the changing season.
Unfortunately I've only  seen this image on TFT monitors so I'm having
problems deciding about the colors used.

Anywho...some basic stats for the image are...
Two height  fields are  used for the landscape.  These were originally
created in Terragen  and  transfered  to  WorldMachine where they were
then exported to POVRay.
The rocks in  the river  are  isosurface functions  placed by a simple
trace. There are 800 rocks.
The trees  and  shrubs were created in POV Tree and exported as meshes.
The plants were also  placed with a  trace function with  a random gen-
erator.  There are 150 foreground trees,  275 background trees and 5000
shrubs.
The leaves  are  meshes created  in Anim8or  and  converted by PoseRay.
75,000 leaves were scattered  by  the trace function and again a random
function wqas used to vary the colors.
The ducks... now this turned out to be  a challenge.  The original duck
was modeled in Anim8or.  The original subdivided duck exeded the limits
of Anim8or and had to be remodeled to a lower triangle count.  The duck
contains around  50,000 triangles.  I created a difference of the water
surface  and foreground height field  and this  was  used  for  a trace
function to place the ducks and leaves on the water. A mix of 300 ducks
and leaves were looped and placed with the trace function.
The dead tree in the river is another mesh created with POV Tree.
There are 7 fish in the river  even though only  one is really visible.
The fish are a simple mesh I found online and they were placed by hand.

Orignally I tried using  a media haze  for the fog but  my render times
dropped to <5 PPS. Since there  was very little difference in the final
image when scaled down to 250k I opted to use simple fog.

This is the first image I've submitted  to IRTC so any critisism,  good
or bad is appreciated.


