TITLE: Elements
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: elements.jpg
ZIPFILE: elements.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray 3.6.1
        

TOOLS USED: 


        povray editor
        Irfanview (to stitch together, resize, convert to jpg, & add copyright)
        OpenOffice.org Writer (for this text doc!)
        

RENDER TIME: 


        approx 25h (rendered in 2 sections)


HARDWARE USED: 


        Athlon XP 3200+ 2.22GHz 1GB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


          Fire vs Water
          Earth vs Sky

A little borderline surrealism for your viewing enjoyment.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This idea was inspired by a conversation I was having at work, where I
discovered one of my colleagues shared my fascination with playing with the
fundamental _rules_ of our world (a topic I've explored in many of my previous
pictures, e.g. A cube shaped planet, large rocks floating in the air). Anyway,
this got me thinking about these ideas and that lead to this idea for a
representation of the 4 classical elements and how they oppose one-another.

So anyway, this image was built in the 10 days before the deadline! It's always
annoying when you get a good idea at the last minute.


Here's a brief catalogue of the elements of the scene and what they're made out
of, please use this for reference if there's any bit you're interested in,
don't feel obliged to read it all!:

Lens
        The camera has a few photographic effects, achieved using an actual lens
placed in front of it. The effects are: distortion, hence the horizon not being
a straight line; dispersion, the slight separation of colours towards the edges
of the lens; uneven focal blur, so the edges blur more than the middle; and
finally vignetting, totally faked by just darkening the lens towards the edge.

Sky
        Simply a few layered gradients in nice colours. Also a quick thank-you
to Sean Day on the pov newsgroups for pointing out it was too dark in an
earlier version of the scene.

Sun
        A sphere filled with emitting media, combined with a granite pattern to
get the effect of a few rays/spikes on the edge.

Rock
        An isosurface formed by combining a very smooth basic shape (a sphere
blended with another quartic function) with a very complex multi-layered
pattern. The layers include some large scale noise (pov's spotted pattern) to
hide the smooth underlying shape, a granite pattern to get the lumpiness, and
another granite pattern scaled to give subtle layering in the rock. The pigment
borrows some of those patterns so the colour relates to the shape a little.

Stones round fire
        Superellipsoids, randomly placed, rotated, scaled, and coloured to get
an approximate circle. The pigment & normal are based on pov's granite pattern,
and I've made the rocks quite reflective so they look wet.

Fire wood
        Isosurfaces, based on turbulence applied to a superellipsoid. The
scaling makes the turbulence look like wood grain, and the pigment has a wood
grain pattern to reinforce this.

Fire
        Media, mostly emission with a bit of absorption to give it a slight
opacity. The pattern combines granite (again!) with a spherical density and
some transforms to make a fairly hard edge. I used a lot of trial and error and
didn't really get anything good until I looked at a photo and realised in day
light fire is not very bright (although I've still made it brighter than my
reference photo, just so people know what it's supposed to be). The lack of
smoke is based on my reference photos which showed only very faint smoke, my
desire to maintain the clean composition of this image, plus my very limited
time!

Sand
        A height field based on a function. The function gives a circular "pool"
with granite pattern to make it random, the pool gets cut off half way so it
just becomes a small concave bit of beach on the edge of the sea.

Sea
        This is by far the most complex element of the scene. It's another
function-heightfield. Based on a sine transform of the beach (meaning nearby
waves follow the shape of the beach), with a different function blended in
further away to give roughly parallel distant waves.
        The material is a fairly accurate water effect (fresnel, refraction)
combined with photons to get the correct lighting effects (notice under each
wave there's a lighter bit of sand caused by the magnifying effect of the wave
shape), and media to make the water dark green in the deeper areas - which
appears greeny-blue due to the sky reflecting in the water (much like the real
world). The foam is based on measuring the difference between the water & beach
functions, and blending in a different material where they get close. The
material is just a white granite pattern & normal map.
        The photons also blur the shadows of the things in the fire, which is
the main reason I added photons to the scene (a hard shadow underwater looked
totally wrong). Obviously I could have used an area light but I like the hard
shadows on the distant rock. Another acknowledgement needs to go here to Alain
on the pov newsgroups who came up with some great suggestions for how I could
avoid needing to do photons for the entire ocean! Although in the end I didn't
use any of his suggestions and decided instead to use photons for the majority
of the nearby water.


One final note, there's an overall yin-yang kind of shape to the image. This
wasn't planned but I think it must have slipped in subconsciously, and makes
reference back to my image in the contrast round a few years ago. Strange :)

Surprisingly, there's not much I'd add if I had the time. This is one of my best
images and took a fraction of the time of all my other works. However there's a
few small details I'd like to add: subtle smoke and heat haze on the fire, some
small things on the beach (shells, seaweed etc), some water splashing &
steaming where it hits the firewood & rocks, perhaps some grass or moss on the
top of the big rock, a few more rocks to make that join up to the beach (though
from this angle you can't see that it doesn't). Really I'm very pleased with
the image, I hope you like it too!

So, in conclusion: Granite :)

--
Tek
evilsuperbrain.com




