TITLE: Old-Time Fishing Pond in the Rain.

NAME: Isaiah Eyre
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: IsaiahDave@aol.com
WEBPAGE: 

TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rain1.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio 5


TOOLS USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio 5 for modelling, Paint Shop Pro 4 and 5 for
textures, Terrain Forge for land.


RENDER TIME: 
    ? (I forgot to time it! But it took an awful darn long time!)


HARDWARE USED: 
    486 DX2 66, 20MB RAM, 1MB video (laughing), 340MB HDD, 540MB
HDD.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The sun has set, the clouds have rolled in, and it's raining
at the old fishing pond. This image's quality was somewhat lost after I resized
it..It still looks OK, though.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started with the terrain, using Paint Shop Pro to create heightfields, and
Terrain Forge to extrude them. I imported them into RDS and arranged them. For
the water, I made a greyscale heightfield map of a bunch of white rings on a
black background., This image was put into the bump channel on the water, and I
added some reflection and some faint transparency. For the dock, 
I wanted each piece to look unique, so I modified each log to look uniquely
different than the other. I put a bump map and a little bit of reflection on
the logs to make them look like they were wet. For the grass, I extruded a
group of tiny circles and bent them in different directions so they looked more
natural.

I made a bucket to be floating in the water, if you can see it.. That's one of
my favorite elements in the scene because it looks exacly how I wanted it to.

For the rain, I made a transparency map made up of a white background with light
gray streaks for raindrops. I simply mapped the image over a cube in the
transparency channel.

I really wanted to do more for this image.. I wanted to add some trees in the
background, some softer grass back and around the terrain, but after I rendered
the first sample, which took almost all day, I decided I didn't want to,
especially since I'm using a dinky 66MHz CPU. 
I really could've done a better job, but the rules say no post-processing, so I
had to keep it simple. (3-D graphics are REALLY HARD to work with on a 486.)
Anyway, that's it. 


