TITLE: Earth XXS or the Dead and the Living Nature
NAME: Ulf Schreiber
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: ulf.schreiber@gmx.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.fen.baynet.de/ulf.schreiber/
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: earthxxs.jpg
ZIPFILE: earthxxs.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02 W95 (previews&design); Povpro (final renderings, I
did not benchmark it on my K6,
          but it felt faster than regular POV until I saw how this Intel Proton
compiled and _extremely_ 
          pentium optimized version behaved on a P133. )

TOOLS USED: 
    Leveller, for the height fields, Minesweeper for subjectively
speeding up previews,
         various rulers, a calculator, and... moray for one single unused spline
(I seem to prefer handcoding)

RENDER TIME: 
    Quite long, splitted and unsplitted, put together again and so on,
about two days, maybe.

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6 233, (P133 only an unused partial rendering)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Nature - aren't this all those green things standing around everywhere?
I htink most tracers thought this after reading the topic: An enormous jungle
scene with excessive plantlife, some dead trees
only scarcely viewable due to all the ivy climbing over it, and not to forget
strange insects closely circling the camera over 
the wettest of all ground fogs ever. 
So I started: first I need some algorithms that create all the variety of
plantlife, possibly reacting to other plants (evading or 
climbing them), and the rest goes ..hm... no chance for writing such a programme
with my abilities, and if I had it's output
would shurely demand a hundred times my ram (my first (and second and..)
algorithmical plants where really ultra-ugly but huge).
So I gave that project up and thought:
Nature - why not also a dead rock? It is also nature, but nobody  whould ever
think of it as nature. Even empty space!
Now that is an interesting subject, the contrast between living and the
unpopular dead nature. 
At this time luckily a thought of the Gary Larson cartoon "Preserved Wildlife",
the one with the embottled safari animals 
if you know it, made a swing-by manouever around the huge dead-rock planet that
recently materialized in my mind. 
Then it crashed into the living nature opposing the rock and all three together
formed this image in my mind:
A small piece of living nature enclosed and preserved in a glass in contrast to
a big dead-nature world outside of the glass.
A bit like our wonderful blue (and more important a bit green) planet in the
eternity of dead space. (OK, possibly space 
is not as dead, and there is life on other worlds and they are out there
watching us and they are really annoyed that 
they can't by Coca-Cola on Alpha-Centauri which they so awfully much would like
to 'cos they see all our TV 
commercials and so on, bla bla bla         - mh - pedant)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I created the glass nearly completely by hand. The lathe spline I created in
Moray was too inaccurate and slow, 
I had do correct it by hand using only the rough dimensions, and splitting the
lathe into a CSG difference of two
SORs, which made a huge speed increase. The SORs also have less errors, I found
only one in the final scene
(the strange horizontal line a bit below the horizon). As you can see, the glass
has a normal perturbation added.
The original (I have this glass standing directly beneath my keybord) has nearly
the same effect and I think it looks
quite well so.
The two height fields where both created in the steadily growing Leveller
hf-editor. The big dead one is put into 
the scene seven times to make the horizon less "cut". The floor in the
foreground actually is a part of this hf. I
think it is quite apropriate for a dead surface not to use a higher detail level
for it, but this is shurely not the high 
art of scene-building.
**I only included an untested lo-res TGA for this height field, the glass might
fly or be _inside_ of the mountain! 
(Contact me for the huge if you are interested for whatever strande reason you
find)
The starfield is a bit of a RAM killer, it consists of real ambient spheres of
different sizes put onto a semisphere around
the position of the camerea.
The plants are three include files written for this scene, used quite often.  I
don't think they are worth documentation for 
further use or anything, but if you have a particular faible for using primitive
.INCs, feel free to copy my stile of calling them..
The lighting is a even more primitive one: only one single source in the entire
scene which looks_like a sun, not very creative,
but the caustics prove to be a very useful effect.


