TITLE: Sunrise at Lake Solitude
NAME: Mark Wagner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/rengaw03/
TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mwsunris.jpg
ZIPFILE: mwsunris.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    SkyPOV 0.1 alpha

TOOLS USED: 
    SDTSEPOV for heightfield conversion, Display for converting the
final image to JPEG

RENDER TIME: 
    6 hours 12 minutes 20 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    400Mhz AMD K6-II with 128MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Lake Solitude is a mountain lake in Grand Teton National Park.  At almost ten
miles from the nearest road, it is the closest thing to true wilderness that
can be easily found.  Despite the existance of a trail to the lake, relatively
few people find their way there, making Lake Solitude a pristine part of
nature.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The basis of this image is the heightfields.  Two heightfields are used,
converted from SDTS Digital Elevation Models of the area, with a 30 meter
resolution.  My original plan was to convert the heightfields to isosurfaces
and use interpolation and 3d noise to fill in the detail between the data
points of the original heightfield.  However, after a test render took ten
hours to render, compared to five minutes for a heightfield, I decided that I
didn't have a fast enough computer to use that technique.

The textures used are entirely procedural, using a combination of
slope-dependant and proximity patterns, in addition to more conventional
patterns.  A slight modification to the proximity pattern allows it to be used
as a patina pattern, with the color of each point dependant on how exposed it
is.  This allowed me to put grass and snow into crevices in the rock.  The rock
is a fairly conventional granite pattern.  The lake texture is based on
angle-dependant blurred reflection, which does a good job of simulating the
mirror finish of a perfectly still lake.

The sky is a wavelength-dependant Rayleigh media.  The glow around the sun is
from Chris Colefax's Lens Effects include file.  There are actually two glows,
one behind the atmosphere with the sun that provides the reflection in the
lake, and one near the camera to make the main glow sharper.

The rock in the foreground is created from blobs.  My original plan was to have
a bird on the rock greeting the sun, but I didn't have the time to model the
bird.

SkyPOV, a custom version of POV-Ray based on the MegaPOV custom version, is
designed around simulating atmospheric effects such as sunrises and sunsets.  I
plan on adding the ability to simulate effects such as heat waves, mirages, and
sky illumination.

