TITLE: Pools of Radiance
NAME: Mark Nelson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: nels1678@tc.umn.edu
WEBPAGE: http://c02.ml.org/~nh/
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pofr.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Radiance Version 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    pfilt, lparser, rview, rpict, joe, the gimp, a sheet of graph
            paper+pencil, and my TI-85.  

RENDER TIME: 
    ~23hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    1 out of 2 ppro150 cpus with 128megs of ram running linux.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        Well guys, I finally managed to get an irtc entry done on time. :)
This is a big one for me, not only is it my first irtc entry, but this is
the very first project I've done in radiance, and I have to say that I'm
pretty happy with the results.  Of course I wouldn't mind spending more time
working on it... I wanted to add more background out on the sea, maybe add a
boat and a nice beach with some rocks, but my college classes demanded my
attention, and I ended up putting it on hold for a couple weeks.  I was
afraid the nice landscape scenes would be overdone, so I tried to go for
something a bit different, and do an interior building shot, but keep the
daylight environment around to interact with the water.  As the project took
form, it ended up going from a temple to the place you see here.  I think it
looks like a cross between a temple, a museum exhibit, and a rich swimming
pool myself. :)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        The water is probably what I'm most proud of in this image.  It's a
procedural texture that I made by taking the wrinkle.cal file that comes
with the radiance package, and adding a sine curve to it.  The trees were
done using Mark Stock's version of lparser that outputs to .rad files.  The
center sculpture that is hard to see was created by Greg and Cindy Larson.
It actually has glass whales swimming around inside of it, though I couldn't
find a good camera angle to see it along with everything else.  Everything else
in the scene was doing in "joe" text editor.  This was important to me, I
wanted to prove that radiance was a good rendering engine, and that you
could do great things even by hand with it.  I'm hoping my future work will
look even better.  After the image was rendered and the exposure was set
using pfilt, I used ra_ppm and the gimp to convert the image to jpeg.
        If you have any other questions, feel free to send me an email.  
Eventually I'd like to put the source for this image up on my page, though 
it's so messy right now I don't think I want to put it up until I've got 
everything sorted out well.  

THANKS:
        Thanks go out to *all* of #povray on efnet/newnet/dalnet, but 
especially Maleko and the others who put up with looking at new test renders 
every 5 minutes. :) Thanks also go out to oGMo from #e, Cindy and Greg Larson,
Mark Stock, my family, and all of you for giving me a reason to spend so much
time on something I love to do so much.  :)      

            Nite_Hawk 

