TITLE: Iwakuni at Sunrise
NAME: Gordon Griesel
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gordon@mpgenius.com
WEBPAGE: www.mpgenius.com

TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: iwakuni.jpg
ZIPFILE: iwakuni.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        Gordon's ray tracer written in C, which I developed after reading
        the book Photorealism and Ray Tracing in C, Watkins, Coy, Finlay, 1992.


TOOLS USED: 

        TextPad editor
        Paintshop Pro
        pencil and paper


RENDER TIME: 
    02 44 23


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-III 850 laptop with 544MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        The Iwakuni Castle sits on a hillside backed by a bright morning
sunrise.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        This is my first entry in the IRTC... and I feel quite intimidated.

        The castle was created by hand while referring to photographs of
various
        Japanese castles.  I travelled to Japan in 2000 and simply had a great
time.
        Since I had personal photographs of the Iwakuni castle, it is the one I
chose
        to model after.  Then I found a picture of a lantern and low and
behold,
        I had a lantern.  All totaled, there are 164,943 objects in this image
        requiring about 37MB of memory.

        The tree was created using my own tree generator written in C.  Before I
wrote
        it, I looked at Andrew Clinton's Spline-tree to get ideas.

        The terrain, although baren, was created using my own terrain generator
which
        I developed after reading an article in Dr. Dobbs by Robert Krten, 1994.
 It's
        done by generating faults over and over, then smoothing.  It will create
lots
        of different looks, but some are very realistic mountain terrains.

        The bright glowing rays were generated by a function I wrote which might
be
        similar to the POV Media function (POV code is hard to read).  In my
function
        I look for atmospheric media in the air and trace it back to a light
source.
        For a smooth look, I perform adaptive sub-rendering as I go.  It works
pretty
        good.

        FYI, there is no gamma correction or any post processing done on this
image.  Why,
        you might ask... okay, I'm stubborn.  I admit it.
        I created the JPG using source from the Independent JPEG Group's JPEG
source
        code on their web site.

        I am going to try to include the source code for my image file, just so
anyone
        interested can look at it.

        Thanks so much.

        -Gordon-

