TITLE: Misty Morning
NAME: Johannes Eriksson
COUNTRY: Finland
EMAIL: joheriks@abo.fi
TOPIC: Light and fog
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: archipel.jpg
ZIPFILE: archipel.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.6


TOOLS USED: 

    Rhinoceros 3.0, Poser 6, Photoshop
    Gilles Tran's makecloud


RENDER TIME: 

    11h (14 node parallel render)


HARDWARE USED: 

    14 x 2-3 GHz Intel and AMD PCs




IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In this image I try to convey a calm, misty summer morning in a
typical Finnish archipelago setting. The fisherman is heading out to
retrieve the fishing nets which have been collecting perch during
the night.




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I had a clear vision of this image from the beginning since I saw
the topic for the competition: a sunrise with clouds in the sky;
calm sea; silhouetted islands, rocks and a lone boat, all viewed 
through a wide angle lens.

The boat and oars were modelled in Rhino 3D using a couple of simple
sweeps, and the oarsman is the standard Poser male + cowboy hat
prop. I exported the Poser model to .obj and imported it into Rhino,
and then exported the complete mesh to the povray format.

The clouds are spheres filled with scattering media defined by df3
density maps. The density maps were generated with Gilles Tran's 
excellent makecloud:

http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources13.htm

The mist above the sea surface is created using a combination of a
makecloud density file and some procedural media.

The rocks, stones and pebbles scattered around the scene are different
spheres, blobs and procedural isosurfaces. They are randomly placed
around certain points in the scene. The terns sitting on the rocks
were modelled in Rhino (basically they are just flat profiles). The
reeds were generated with a simple tree generator I wrote.

The sky is simply a sky_sphere with a bell-curve like gradient going
from yellow via blue to black. The sun is a white sphere surrounded by
a disc with a cylindrical color map fading out to transparent to
create a soft halo/flare effect. There is one point light for all
objects except the clouds which have their own light source. All in
all I spent a quite a lot of time tweaking the colors of the sky and
the light source color since they control very much the mood of the
image.

A combination of mathematical functions (f_ridged_mf, f_waves, and a
simple doppler frequency shift) was used as the normal map for the
water surface.

There are also three image maps based on photos I've taken in this
image: the background forest and the two far islands. They were placed
on discs and planes which are rotated to face the camera.

To avoid aliasing problems around the reeds, which are composed of
very thing cylinders and cones, I rendered the scene at 2160x1200 and
resmpled it down to the final size in Photoshop. I also used PS to add
the signature and for conversion to JPG.

If you have any questions or want to know more details, do not
hesitate to contact me by email. You can also download the source of
this scene; to render it requires downloading makecloud and tga2df3.
However, please note that rendering this scene at full resolution with
radiosity takes an excruciatingly long time, due to heavy and probably
inefficient use of media--I used a 14 PCs at 2-3 GHz each in parallel
for the final version.

