TITLE: Water over Time
NAME: Matthew J. Sayre
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: desert-irtc@usa.net
TOPIC: Forces of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mjs_wot.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Terragen v0.9.19

TOOLS USED: 
    MS Paint (to transfer .BMP to .JPG), Photoshop Essentials
(branding), SOPack plugin.

RENDER TIME: 
    4h 13m 45s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Panasonic Toughbook CF-51, Intel Centrino


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


And the Watcher returned to one of his favorite planets. This blue-green planet
orbiting third from a small yellow sun. He had returned to one of his favorite
places on this planet, what used to be a gigantic peaceful green field with a
stream flowing through the middle. Now there was this immense gorge here.

Had it been so long since his last visit? Had there been enough time for the
stream to cut into the earth and form this... wound in one of his sanctuaries?


No... not a wound. Just change. A lot of change. It was true, this last trip out
into The Great Darkness between the stars, he traveled further than he had
before and had seen many new things. And he had come back and seen this new
thing. He realized this would be first change of many.

He marvelled at how a simple substance as water could carve great monuments,
given enough time. He had seen storms that decimated the population centers of
this planet, both large and small. He had seen earthquakes that shattered their
dwellings and tore asunder the landscape. But the inhabitants here rebuilt and
repaired when it was over and life went on. All in an infintesimal fraction of
the time to blink an eye in comparison to the time he had last been here. And
the all while, water flowed and carved this new creation out of the land. Just
simple, flowing water.

He mourned his loss and rejoiced his gain, this new sanctuary which he had been
given. He stayed and studied this new place. Eventually, he departed, vowing
not to take so much time before he returned.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I used Terrgen to create this picture. Creating the height field was easy
enough, but the devil was in the details. I just used the internal generator
randomly and kept moving the camera around until I found something I liked. So
I created an image similar to the final picture, but it was just too boring. 

It was then that I explored the world of Terragen Plugins. I found a link to the
SOPack homepage from Planetterragen.com, which I used for the strata on the
walls. It took me a while to find a strata design and height variation scheme I
was happy with. 

The clouds weren't too difficult. I tried many variations, sizes, etc, until I
decided on what is now in the picture.

Placement of the sun was another big issue. It always seemed like either there
was too much light or too much shadow. I think I did a pretty good job of
balancing the light and dark.

I was tinkering forever with the water and the greenery. With the water, I
initally used the default values for "deep" water, which is a blue shade found
similar to a lake. It just didn't look right. I tried a turquiose/greener more
natural looking color, but I couldn't get it to work. So I changed it to what
you see now. It was pretty much the same way with the greenery. I just couldn't
get the differing shades of green to balance right. I kept the deeper green
down towards the water and the lighter green up on top of the rocks.

All in all. I'm pretty happy with the picture, I think it needs to be tweaked
more, but I can keep doing that forever and never be happy with it...

