TITLE: Lake of tranquility
NAME: Michael Huth
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: huth@mail.uni-mainz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~huth/
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: lot8x6.jpg
ZIPFILE: lot8x6.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1a for Windows 95/NT

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray for Windows 95 as modeller; own tools programmed in pascal

RENDER TIME: 
    11min 16sec for 800x600, AA0.3

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166/32MB RAM under Windows 95


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the course of preparing a lecture I'll be giving about the growth 
of thin films I was doing some simulations concerning the diffusion process
of atoms on the surface of a substrate. Specifically, there is a diffusion 
barrier atoma have to overcome each time they encounter the edge of a growth
island. The 'ring of rocks' which can be seen on the image represents this
diffusion barrier. I thought this might give a nice 'frame' for a quite little
lake... (well, one could argue about my interpretion of nice..)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The main work is hidden in the physical model I used to calculate the 
diffusion barrier followed by some coding in Pascal. Since this program
can hardly be used by anybody else (no comments, e.g.) there is no point
in making it available to others. 
Once the diffusion barrier was calculated on a grid of 240x240 points I created
a corresponding height field in TGA format (24bit uncompressed) using, again, a
small home-made Pascal program.
After importing the height field in Moray I added the lake, the planet, and the
'sky'
essentially using standard textures included in the Povray distribution.

