TITLE: The Lost Kingdom
NAME: Joseph Eddy
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: eddy0019@tc.umn.edu
WEBPAGE: http://jceddy.tripod.com/
TOPIC: The Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jcesea.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    Pov-Ray, Microsoft Image Composer (For Jpeg Conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    about 13 hrs.

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 366, 128 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This scene is loosely based on the undersea Lost Kingdom of Weis and Hickman's
world of Thimhallan.  This is a more futuristic version.  The city has long
since been deserted and the only remnants of the civilisation once housed there
are the near-flawless natural power system, and the greeat Ruby Palace...much
to big to move, obviously.  A small submarine is checking out the
newly-rediscovered cluster of domes resting along the ocean floor.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started out by arranging spheres for the domes of the Kingdom according to a
pictoral map in the Darksword Adventures book...then worked from there.  The
ocean floor is a marble-ish texture, rippled and made a bit shiny to create the
illusion of caustics from the ocean surface.  There is some dark-blue fog to
help along the underwater effect.  The main lighting of the scene comes from
four light sources placed high in the sky (I use four instead of one so the
shadows cast by the domes aren't to sharp).  Also, the glowing "energy" spheres
at the center of each dome cast bluish light that is reflected from the (CSG)
fish and the submarine...this light has a relatively small falloff value so it
doesn't effect the lighting of the ocean floor itself too greatly.  Most of the
rendering time can be attributed to the fact that there are 20+ light sources
in the scene.

