TITLE: Fata Morgana
NAME: Alfred Houdijk
COUNTRY: NL
EMAIL: ahoudijk@gironet.nl
WEBPAGE: none yet
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: awater.jpg
ZIPFILE: awater.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch (skull, glass and can) and Lview pro (gamma and text)

RENDER TIME: 
    8h 14m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Toshiba Tecra 510CDT laptop, P-133 (I think...), 48 MB.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The (idea of the) picture
-------------------------
The subject of the competition is WATER. During a meeting at my work,
not too interesting apparently, I was looking at my glass of water, 
and noticed the three guys sitting opposite to me reflected upside-down
through the water. So I thougt to do a glass of water.
In the meeting there was also a watercan, but that was round, somewhat 
conicly shaped. I didn't have one like that at home to model, so the
one in the picture I designed myself.
The glass and can should go in a scene, but what? (A meetingroom 
obviously not.) I thought: water is in everything, no life without 
water. So I came to the idea to create a desert, with a skull and some 
bones. The can and glass should be seen as a kind of fata morgana. The 
sun and pyramids came spontaneously while doing.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The process
-----------
To begin with, this picture is only a hinch of what I had in mind. I am 
not satisfied at all with the shape of the skull, nor with the texture 
I gave it. I think of it as a skull that has been in the sand for 
decades, and it's worn off. The tray with the glass and can of water 
I would have liked to be more like a fata morgana. Also I would have 
liked the glass and can to have had ice cubes in them, as well as 
condense on the side. But I could not find out how to put those ideas 
into the picture. And I simply couldn't spend more time on this, 
since to me it's only a hobby.
(But hey, this is only the first picture I did that is not an image 
of some part of my home! And I learned a lot doing it: using a 
patch-editor, focal blurr, gamma correction are some of the things.
Oh, if only there was a quicker way to get the lighting just right. 
You still have to use the trial and error method, which is soooooo 
time consuming.
At first, I tried to do glass objects and contents as separate patches. 
It turned out that the two together turned very dark, for wich I 
couldn't find an explanation. This has cost me a lot of time! So I 
changed the glass-objects, and they now have a raised bottom... This 
looked more like what I had in mind!
I experimented with an extra shadeless lightsource but wasn't satified. 
It didn't make the picture more real. So I stuck with the single light 
source, the sun. And I think that is the way it sould be in this picture.

Alfred Houdijk, 4 october 1998

