TITLE: Holland Unplugged
NAME: Patrick Beisser
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: beisser@pasteur.fr
WEBPAGE: http://mapage.noos.fr/beisser/irtc_sea.html
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: unplug.jpg
ZIPFILE: unplug.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray PPC version 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    GraphicConverter 3.9.1 to convert Targa to JPEG

RENDER TIME: 
    I forgot to check, but it was ready after my one-hour walk.

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac 233 MHz G3


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The Netherlands, in particular the two provincies North- and South-Holland, are
famous for their 'polder' landscapes. These polders are basically stretches of
artificial land below sea level. They are surrounded by dikes and kept dry by
constantly pumping out water using windmills. The mills in the submitted image
are modeled after the 18th-century windmills of Kinderdijk (South-Holland).
When the IRTC team announced 'Sea' to be the stills topic, I immediately became
intrigued by the macabre idea of a Dutch land- or rather seascape with its
dikes unplugged. Hence 'Holland Unplugged'.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All done in POV-Ray 3.1, folks. I hereby enclose all POV documents used to
generate the image. The basis of the scene is the 'hight_field' sea floor. The
image for this height field was made with the POV-Ray file 'sbshape.pov', set
to generate a 16-bit PNG file. The sea floor, actually being flooded grassland,
is obscured by the water, but if you look carefully you might still discern a
hint of dike under the windmills. Initially, I found it quite difficult to
generate a transparent water surface. Since I was accustomed to the POV-Ray 3.0
syntax, it took some time to discover the new 'interior' description in the 3.1
version. This discription enabled me to generate a water layer from the
intersection between a cube and a height field (image generated with
'wshape.pov') complete with index of refraction and attenuation of
transparency. The windmills were made with solid primitives and assembled with
CSG (see POV-Ray manual).

Paris, July 15, 2000, Patrick Beisser

