TITLE: Seacoast
NAME: David A.R. Wallace
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
EMAIL: darwallace@earthlink.net
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: seacoast.jpg
ZIPFILE: seacoast.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1/MegaPOV 0.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro (for JPEG conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    1 39 13

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 400, 96 MB RAM.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  A view from the sea toward the shore under a partly cloudy sky.  The
water contains some fish, some branched coral, and a turtle.  Five
seabirds fly overhead, three in a group, one rising from the water, and
one above the picture yet casting a shadow on the water.  The simple
coastline boasts seven trees.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  The image consists of 6 major element types:

1. The water.  I found Michael Hough's tutorial on how to properly render
  water very useful if not critical.  I adapted it to my purpose with a
  more complex normal function, a modified absorption color and strength,
  and a lower reflection.  You can just see the seabed near the camera
  position.  The underlying object is just a simple plane.

2. Coral.  The branched coral was designed using Gilles Tran's MakeTree
  macro.  The texture was adapted from a bone texture I made earlier.
  Since the corals are at the bottom of the sea, the water's absorption
  and refraction obscure them greatly.

3. Fish.  The fish is one of my simpler objects: all CSG of basic shapes.
  The result is straightforward enough.  The body texture has two layers,
  bozo on top of agate, with the color a mottled mix of black, green, and
  white.  The eyes are clear green, the mouth is orange-yellow, and the
  gill slits are black.

4. Turtle.  The shell is a basic CSG combo with some torus objects.  The
  crackle texture, with accompanying normal, is very effective despite
  its simplicity.  The rest of the turtle is a blob object using spheres,
  cylinders, and transformations.  The turtle has legs but the water's
  reflection obscures them.  The eyes do appear to be somewhat sunken.

5. Trees.  A more traditional product of the MakeTree macro, complete
  with broad leaf foliage and Mr. Tran's bark and leaf textures.  Large,
  detailed, and in plain sight, the only obstacle to detail in the
  picture is sheer distance (6500-9000 units out!).  By comparison, the
  close-up fish is 3.5 units out in the z direction and the turtle is
  5.5 units out.

6. Birds.  The body and head are blobs, the beak and eyes are CSG, but
  the wings deserve special attention.  They are parametric surfaces
  which were created using a special macro of my own design which I will
  describe separately.  Actually, each wing has 2 surfaces each.  The
  body texture is a scaled crackle with some turbulence which seems to
  mimic feathers fairly well.  The color is white with some dark gray.
  The beak is orange and the eyes are blue.

  MegaPOV has a parametric surface generator but I created a generator of
my own as a macro which writes a mesh object into a file.  Placing the
object in your scene requires only an object{ #include "paraobj.inc" }
statement.  The macro's parameters require a separate include file
because some of them are macros themselves.  You can name the object file
yourself as its name is one of the parameters.  I have since adapted it
to allow for random variances (Let MegaPOV try that ;}) and various
levels of message detail.

  One issue came up as I was creating this image.  MegaPOV's interior_
texture statement looked very inviting as I was planning on making a
tube-like coral with a crackle medium.  Unfortunately, I could not make
it work.  I also tried a more traditional interior { media { crackle } },
but the density pattern was the exact opposite of what I wanted };.  The
reef itself would have been a blob object.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The POV Team for their excellent, and free, raytracing program.

Nathan Kopp for his MegaPOV compilation.  I used version 0.5.

Gilles Tran for his MakeTree macro, which was used to design the corals
  and trees.

The Absolute Background Textures Archive, which supplied the sky texture.

Michael Hough for his excellent water tutorial, which I adapted for this
  image.  It was this tutorial that prompted me to use MegaPOV.

