TITLE: A Lighthouse View
NAME: Frank David
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: fjdavid@surf-ici.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.tripod.com/FrankDavid
TOPIC: Landmark
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: alh_view.jpg
ZIPFILE: alh_view.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1.a

TOOLS USED: 
    PaintShop Pro 4.0, Terrain Maker

RENDER TIME: 
    ?? hours ?? minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-233 mhz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  A Lighthouse View is based on the Concord Point Lighthouse in Havre De Grace,

Maryland. The lighthouse was built in 1827 and was decommissioned in 1975 with 
plans to make the keeper's dwelling into a museum. I took some artistic license

in the scene and the design of the lens as well. This lens is a combination of 
several different lighthouse lenses that I researched for this project. This is

only my second full scene I've created and the second one that I've submitted 
to the IRTC since I first started playing with POV-Ray early this year.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  The lighthouse scene is made up of primitives using a lot of CSG's and
textures 
to accomplish the items. The scene was created using POV-Ray except for the
sand, 
it was created with Terrain Maker. The sand and ground texture map was modified
with PaintShop Pro 4.0. The most time consuming item in the scene was the lens.

The first time I modeled it I took spheres and cut them into pieces to assembly

one vertical frame piece. Then rotated each around the center to make the 8 
sided lens. I then gave it a transparency and ior factor which gave dramatic
results, 
however, the lens took over 16 hours to trace. Also, when the lens was put into
the 
scene, the use of ior caused the lens to magnify everything and basicly turned
black.
I scrapped that lens and changed each panel  to a ripple texture on a thin box
and 
scaled it to get the bullseye effect then rotated it around the center to make
the 8 sided 
prism. The light beam is made up of two truncated cones. the inner one being
transparent
white and the outter being a cloud texture scaled to look like speckles in the
light.

  The boat in the ocean and the one upside down on the shore is the same object
of 
two intersecting spheres CSG's cut and a sail added. The water is a plane with a
normal
texture of bumps scaled and a finish added to give the desired effect. The sand
and 
ground were made in Terrain Maker as a height field and a color map. All in all
I learned 
a lot with this scene and plan on spending a lot more time developing my use of
textures, 
one of the most difficult parts of turning a "picture" into a scene.

