EMAIL: glenn@mccarters.net
NAME: Glenn McCarter
TOPIC: Light and Fog
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
TITLE: Night Train
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/gmccarter
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.6
TOOLS USED:
  POV-Ray editor (scene modeling, lighting, textures)
  Paint Shop Pro (image map, JPEG conversion, add signature)

RENDER TIME: 8h 42m
HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2100+, overclocked 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

It's a couple hours past midnight on a warm foggy evening, somewhere east of Flagstaff.  The Zephyr waits at a siding, the deep hum of diesel engines idling in the background.  Spence cannot sleep, too many things on his mind.  He steps off to stretch his legs and light up a smoke.  He starts to relax.  But very soon, Spencer's life is going to change forever...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This image evolved in an unusual way.  I normally do 3d modeling with a specific image in mind.  But this time, a strange thing happened along the way.  The original scene had a large water tower dominating the sky, casting a lot of shadows.  But one time I accidentaly left the water tower unconnected to the ground... and the image immediately took on a whole new meaning for me.  What had been a quiet period-piece suddenly became a sci-fi alien encounter.

Otherwise, it's just lots of conventional POV-Ray Constructive Solid Geometry modeling, done entirely within the POV-Ray text editor.  No external 3D meshes or models were used.  Two image maps are used, to make a height field and part of a texture.  I restricted myself to a very limited color range, to allow light and shadow to do all the work.

I was especially careful in this image to arrange the shadows as selectively as the objects themselves.  The scene has 6 real light sources (only one interacting with the atmosphere) and a dozen pseudo-lights.  The scene is filled with a media atmosphere, and uses a large dome-shaped sky sphere to enable visible light rays even in skyward directions.  To smooth out the shadows, the main light source is an area light consisting of a 3x3 array.  These 9 lights are sampled 300 times along each ray to produce the soft light beams in the foggy atmosphere.
