TITLE: to sing with the whale
NAME: Marc Schimmler
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: schimmler@ica.uni-stuttgart.de
WEBPAGE: ---
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: humpback.jpg
ZIPFILE: humpback.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    x-povray v.302

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch (thanx to Mike Clifton), gimp v1.0 (conversion tga - jpg,
            image maps), link.inc from Chris Colefax (thanx also to this
            adress)  

RENDER TIME: 
    31 h 47 m 46 s (while using +SP32)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 90 (48 MB RAM, linux)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I found out that the current topic was water I decided to participate for
the first time. Being a maritime soul now far away from the coast I've chosen
a scene that portraits the sea. What you see here is a male humpback whale in
its typical position for "singing". They create wonderful tunes when they are
in their breeding and mating waters (for example the caribbean sea or the
waters around the hawaian island). They take a position which is head down. If
you can You should listen to one of the existing recordings of their singing.
I pictured a rather dramatic moment when a diver approaches the singing
whale near a anchored seasign while a small school of fish escapes from this
scene.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The whale and the diver (except for the air tank,valve and breathing automat
which were created by simple csg) were created by using sPatch (again: thank
you Mike for this wonderful tool!).  While I used only very simple textures
for the diver (I am kinda lazy), I used two image maps for the whale. One for
the body and one for the flippers. To get a cast for the image map I made a
rendering of the whale from the side with an orthographic camera, no lights
just a white background. That way I got a nearly B&W picture of the whale that
I loaded into gimp, inverted and then filled out in the desired way. I only
had to scale, rotate and translate this image map according to the former
camera position, and voila there it is. The sPatch files are also included in
the zip-file. Feel free to use them. I would be glad to hear from anyone who
found them useful. The fish were also made by csg. They consist of a scaled
sphere and three triangular patches that are clipped by two planes. In their
simple way I really like them. They were positioned by a simple custom program
in a random manner (position and direction). The bubbles of the whale were
randomly positioned in a cone (the biggest bubbles at the top and scaled in the
y-direction) while the three bubble clusters made by the diver were positioned
along a line (the biggest bubbles first,in a higher position and scaled in
y-direction). The older clusters are the more are they stretched. The seasign
was made by two cones and a cylinder but only the lower cone is
visible. Believe it or not (or just look at the sources) ... it is
fire-red. Its green-grey lokk (as nearly anything underwater) is a effect of
the surface plane which is realy a plane with a bump surface. The bumps were
scaled in all three directions (<10,2,2>) which results to my oppion in a sea
surface that you would find at a calm day. It was given an ior of 1.333 and
has a transparent pigment laid onto it. The tricky part was were the
caustics. My first test using the faked caustics lead to nice pics but the
caustics are faked indeed. The lightpaths were curved so that this method is
not usable. I decided to use 40 randomly distributed spotlights in the viewing
direction. I am not quit satisfied with that but due to my time consuming job I
ran out of time so this has to work.
BTW, when I looked through the former competions, just in middle of this work,
I found a submission by Nathan O'Brien (I admire his work) that shows a
similiar scene. No copy was intended, but due to the advanced level of my
model I decided against dumping it. I hope you understand that. Any comments
are really welcome.

This picture is dedicated to my wife and my little boys for giving me the time
to complete this work.



