TITLE: Road
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: road.jpg
ZIPFILE: road.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5



TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
        Paint Shop Pro 5
        MakeTree by Gilles Tran (www.oylnale.com)
        Crossroads 3D by Keith Rule
                (http://home.europa.com/~keithr/crossroads)
        WorldMachine 0.98 beta by Stephen Schmitt
                (http://students.washington.edu/sschmitt/world/)



RENDER TIME: 


        13 hours 5 minutes



HARDWARE USED: 


        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The driver rounds a corner to see the long road still ahead of him...

The image was rendered at 2560x1024, but I felt that was a bit excessive for
casual IRTC viewers so I resized it to 1280x512. If you want to see the full
version it's on my website:
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com/images/road_big.jpg



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The landscape was created in world machine. The basic shape is a hybrid
multi-fractal with some tweaking to make it fit my mental image, then on top of
that I've added erosion. The clever bit is the road, which was also created in
worldmachine. I used a smooth noise function for the basic direction, then I
modified the lanscape to add zig-zags on the areas of steep slope. The road's
width is achieved by height selecting a hard edge for the centre of the road,
then applying a smooth to it, so that the road's width is constant along it's
length. The road is then applied to the terrain so that it is raised and
smoothed from the underlying terrain shape. I've included the world machine
source in the zip file.

The landscape texture uses some macros I've created to roughly imitate the
superb texturing techniques used in Terragen. They allow textures to be built
up in layers, where each layer can be a complex texture in itself, with rules
on how noisey the blend between this and the underlying texture should be. Each
layer can be set to have a max & min slope, and a max and min height, with
ranges on both these values. The landscape uses 4 layers to do: Rock, Soil,
Grass, and Snow. The snow has some interesting diffuse properties to make it
catch the light nicely. If I get time I'll refine the macros to reproduce all
the features of terragen's textures and distribute them on my website.

The road texture uses a seperate image exported from world machine (derived from
the same source as that used to raise and smooth the road in the heightfield).
This is used to blend between a tarmac texture (black with specular and a
granite normal), some gravel at the road edge, and the white line down the
middle. The white line is dashed using a simple gradient, which means if you
could see the lines where the road bends in the distance, you'd see the dashes
become much longer!

The sky consists of a sky_sphere, with a simple gradient and a glow for the sun,
and a cloud sphere. The cloud sphere has a 3 layer transparent texture on it
based on a wrinkle pigment. I played with a few different settings to get the
right effect, but I still had to cheat and force it to not cast shadows on the
land.

The fog is standard pov fog. I didn't want to use media since it might bump up
the render times severely. There's some very subtle turbulence on the fog, it's
hardly noticeable now but without it the scene seemed rather flat.

The car is a model downloaded from 3D cafe and converted to pov using
crossroads, then textured by hand in pov & painst shop pro. It's a Lancia Beta
HPE, apparently, though a friend of mine who's a car fanatic says it doesn't
look quite like one! In any case it serves the purpose. The car has a racing
livery on it, to imply it's maybe taking part in some kind of rally, though at
the size it appears in the image this isn't obvious. I leave the purpose of the
drive open to interpretation.

The trees are made with maketree. They're variations on one of the standard
trees that comes with maketree, but with a slight tweak to the textures to make
them work with my lighting setup. There's only actually 2 different variations
which are instanced 80 times throughout the scene, though even on the high res
image I can only see 8 of them!





