TITLE: Sea Battles
NAME: Kevin Jackson-Mead
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jacksonmead@mindspring.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.mindspring.com/~jacksonmead
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kjmsea.jpg
ZIPFILE: kjmsea.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    SEA Graphics and Animation Viewer
(http://www.photodex.com/products/dos/index.html)
            WinMegaPov 0.5a

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour, 1 minute, 32 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD-K7 500MHZ, 256MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I had a friend over the other night, and we were looking for something to do. 
Being too lazy to
go out and do anything, I pulled out an old game called "Sea Battles".  This was
the rare 1967
"Real Water" edition.  It didn't sell too well, due to the fact that many of the
boards opened up
while they were still in the stores, and the boxes became soaked.  Since it's so
rare, it's
probably worth a few bucks, but I'd rather keep it around to play with.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I thought I'd keep it simple for my first real image.  The boats are prisms. 
The game board, game
box, and picutre on the wall are boxes.  The picture frame is a difference of
boxes.  The table is
a box with cylinders for legs.  The picture on the cover of the game box is an
image map that I
made with POV (the image and source are included in the source zip).  The framed
picture on the
wall is also an image map (image and source included in zip) of a picture that I
made using the
first macro I created.  This one was done in MegaPOV because of how it treats
cylindrical lights.
Speaking of macros, the little "Now With Real Water" sticker on the game box was
made using my
second macro, one that creates star-shaped prisms given the number of points and
the inner and
outer radii.

The textures on the table and picture frame are from the standard woods.inc
include file.  The
textures on the ships are from the standard metals.inc include file.  For the
water, I started
with one of the samples in the POV documentation, and then I changed the normal
(slightly) and
the pigment.  The box cover has a crackle pattern scaled down pretty small.  I'm
not entirely
happy with it, but it was the best I could do with what I know so far.  I also
set the ambient on
the box cover up, since it was in shadow.  I messed around with putting other
lights in and
positioning the box in other ways, but I was not happy with those results. 
Again, I'm not
entirely pleased with how it turned out, but I guess it will have to do.  My
main concern was that
it was visible, since it is important to the scene.  If you can, imagine that
the framed picture
is painted on black velvet.  I didn't want to mess with trying to get that
texture.  And, if I
remember correctly from black velvet pictures of Jesus in my grandparents'
house, viewed from a
certain distance, there isn't a whole lot of visible texturing on a black velvet
painting.  The
room itself (walls, ceiling, and floor) have no texture.  Next time I do an
indoor scene, I'll
play with wall and rug textures.

Because I'm into the programming part, I decided to do some random placing of
objects in the scene.
The ships on the board are randomly placed on the appropriate side, and the side
board pieces on the
near side are randomly up or on their side, and they have a random rotation.  I
played with different
seed values for the various placements until I got ones that I was happy with.

After making this image, I did a search on "Sea Battles" and turned up some
games.  I found a computer
game called "Admiral: Sea Battles", which was put out by Megamedia
(http://www.megamedia.com/ - doesn't
appear to be around any more).  I also found a pencil-and-paper wargame by Warp
Spawn Games entitled
"Sea Battles" (http://www.angelfire.com/games2/warpspawn/Seab.html).  I also
found a reference
(http://www.theminiaturespage.com/rules/ww2/lastsea.html) to an out-of-print
game called "The Last Sea
Battles".  It is a miniatures game designed by Keith Robinson and published in
1976 by Leicester
Micromodels Ltd.  I also found a handheld electronic game called "Sea Battle"
(http://www.tetravalence.com.hk/product/pro_1.htm) made by Tetravalence
Electronics Manufacturing Ltd.
I also found what looks like a Java version on Battleship called "Sea Battle" at
the Games Park web
site (http://www.gamespark.com/seabattle.html).  Speaking of Battleship
(http://www.battleship.com),
I think the phrase "The Game of Naval Warfare" might have been on that game, but
I can't remember.
Please note that neither I nor my IRTC submission have absolutely nothing to do
with any of these games
or companies.

Finally, if you've made it this far into the description, I'd like to thank a
few people.  Many thanks
to the people of the povray.binaries.images group.  Thanks to them, I got some
feedback on various
pieces of this, including being pointed to SEA (see link at top of file), the
program which I used
to convert the final PNG image to JPEG.  And a big thanks to my wife, Cat, for
feedback and
suggestions on the image.  It is much better because of her input.


