TITLE: Walking with dinosaurs
NAME: Christophe BOUFFARTIGUE
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: christophe.bouffartigue@libertysurf.fr
WEBPAGE: nop.

TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cbwild.jpg
ZIPFILE: cbwild.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        WinMegapov 0.5


TOOLS USED: 

prog.
        3DWin               (by Thomas Baier,
http://www.stmuc.com/thbaier/tools.html)
        UVMApper            (by Steve Cox, http://home.pb.net/~stevecox/)
        OBJuvPOV            (by Cliff Bowman,
http://www.who3d.cwc.net/Models.html)
        The GIMP            (by Peter Mattis & Spencer Kimball,
http://www.gimp.org/)
macros & inc.
        Reorient macro      (by John Vansickle,
http://users.erols.com/vansickl/povray.htm)
        Tile Generator      (by Chris Colefax,
http://www.geocities.com/ccolefax/)
        Stone Generator.    (by Jaime Vives Piqueres,
http://www.ctav.es/jaime/)
        maketree & mgrass   (by Gilles Tran,
http://www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/)
        TomTrees   (by Thom Aust, http://www.koeln.netsurf.de/~thom.aust/)


RENDER TIME: 

        11h 18mn


HARDWARE USED: 

        Pentium MMX @180MHz (!!!) 48 Mo RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        ... Wilderness... Places where nature holds sway and man is unknown
        or insignificant... Hum... not much places like these on earth,
nowadays...
        Deep oceans ??? Not much light, not a good subject for render...
        Deep jungle ??? Huh ??? Dr Livingstone, I presume ???
        Sunbaked deserts ?? Some Bedouins live here...
        Isolated icecaps ?? Ooops, there's a scientific campsite, right in the
middle...
        Man, man, man everywhere.... So, let's jump into our time machine, and
back to the
        fut... huh.. to the past, when dinosaurs walked the earth (like they
said in "Jurassic
        Park"... ;)), and when man didn't kick up a fuss.....


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


        Well..., my first landscape (except some seascapes when i first
        discover POV-Ray some years ago). Here we go...

        Background:
        -----------
        The far mountains and the (less) far hills are height fields generated
with POV (essentially
        a wrinkles pattern, with several spotlights, see hf1.pov and hf2.pov).
The mountains are
        textured using the slope pattern from MegaPOV (slope dependant pattern).
The sky is a simple
        textured plane. There's also a constant fog (which gives the gradient of
the sky...).

        The ground and water:
        ---------------------
        For the ground, I've generated a big height field (hfsol.pov), with a
torrent running in the middle.
        Then, I've cropped an interesting part of this image, and make it
tileable with Chris Colefax 's Tile
        Generator. So the ground is constitued of 6 times the same height field
(tiled in the direction
        of tbe viewing). The grass on the ground is a simple texture. The water
is a simple plane,
        with the right texture (I hope). Tons of little spheres were dropped on
the ground, near the
        water level. The grass blades in the river were made with Gilles Tran's
MakeBlade macro (mgrass.pov),
        and placed in groups with a little macro I wrote. The stones were made
with Jaime Vives Piqueres'
        Stone Generator, which he wrote for his "Water" IRTC entry (and first
place ;) ), with a slightly
        different texture.

        The trees:
        ----------
        First, I've rendered some trees using Gilles Tran's Maketree, but the
parsing time and memory
        consumption disuaded me from using them directly in the scene. So, I've
used the same trick as
        Robert J. Becraft in his "Garden" IRTC entry: image maps !!! The trees
were rendered individually,
        (on a black background, without antialiasing, orthographic camera), the
color resolution was
        reduced to 8 bits (palette), the images were mapped on very thin boxes,
always perpendicular
        to the camera direction, and the background color was made totally
transparent. Trees were
        created using Gilles Tran's maketree.pov, and Thom Aust's tomtree.inc. I
didn't have much time
        to find documentation about paleobotanic (I found some fossils...not
very excinting...), so the
        trees are probably some beautiful anachronisms....

        The Fern:
        ---------
        In order to mask an empty area in the lower right corner of the picture,
I wrote some macros to
        make a fern-like plant. It is made of a collection of mesh, so it
doesn't use too much memory, and
        renders reasonnably fast. Source is available in fougere.inc (sorry,
comments in french..., I'll
        probably rewrite and make it available in some objects collection...
later... (write on the to-do list)).
        
        The dinosaurs:
        --------------
        The element that make the place wild.... All are meshes found on 3Dcafe
(brachyosaurus by Cyberware,
        plateausorus by David Gordiano (actually, a plateausorus didn't look
like that, but that was
        the name the author gave to his mesh....), pterodactyl by Platinum). The
pterodactyl and brachyosorus
        mesh were not textured, and some maps were provided with the
plateausorus model, but texture info were
        lost in the conversion process. So, all models were converted into OBJ
file type, using 3Dwin. Then,
        UV map information was added to the OBJ file, thanks to UVMapper. The
image maps were created with
        The GIMP (under linux), and the OBJ files were converted into Megapov
mesh2 format with OBJuvPOV. Thanks
        to Gilles Tran and Fabian Brau for explaining to me this way of
processing.


        For further informations, source is provided, as always (well, it's now
my third submission to the IRTC,
        so I think I can write "as always" ;P). The mesh2 files are not
available in the zip (more than 3Mo zipped),
        but the original models are available on 3Dcafe, and you can find all
the tools I used for converting them
        (URL available on the top of this file)... Most image maps can be
rendered with Megapov (source provided),
        and the others (map for dinosaurs) are available as PNG.
        
        I would also like to thank everyone at nzn.fr.3D.pov (news.newz.net) for
their advices and support...

