TITLE: Nevada
NAME: Jaime Vives Piqueres
COUNTRY: Valencia, Spain.
EMAIL: jaime@ctav.es
WEBPAGE: http://www.ctav.es/jaime
TOPIC: NATURE
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nevada.jpg
ZIPFILE: nevada.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.02 (C) POVTeam. (POVMSDOS in a W95 DOS box)

TOOLS USED: 

 Qedit, to write the POV scripts
 PC PAINTBRUSH, to retouch height_fields
 POVRay, to generate some height_fields
 HFSLOPE, a selfmade utility to create material_maps for height_fields
 LView31 to convert TGA to JPG (Quality 95%)

RENDER TIME: 
    1h (external process time included)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel PPro180 256k cache, main board Intel VS440FX


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


 A cold place where I don't want to be more than few minutes. Just the time
needed to say "Wow! What landscape!" and go back home. In fact I've never
visited such kind of place, all is product of my imagination and memory of
photos and films (specially documentaries, which I see a lot), and the
comments of several previewers, specially from David Heys from... Alaska! :)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


 The main target was to create a snowy mountain with a NATURAL look.

 The technical part resulted interesting to me, bcos I wanted to have a real,
more natural mountain, with snow remaining in the most plain parts of the
height_field. I tried at first with simple textures and several height_fields,
but the mountain not looked really snow-covered. I've been forced to

  1)Wait for a slope_map sentence in a next POV version (not 3.1, I suspect),

 or

  2)try to create the slope_map effect with some external programming (I've
    never managed, even remotely, the posibility to modify POV sources).


 So, I've searched the net for a decent TGA file descrition, and found the
nice one from David McDuffee. From here, I started with a simple TGA reader,
not viewer, only to read it and show some information. The next step was to
wrote the same TGA file and to be able later to use it in any other program.
Done this, I've started the real thing: to read a TGA height_field file and
to procces it to create a second TGA, for use as a material_map for the snow.

 It worked not too bad! I'm waiting to put my hands on POV-Ray 3.1 to create
that effect, without external programming...

 All the rest is done within POV, with no other external things. The sky is
present, but the intense fog make it disappear. A layer of clouds is floating
below the camera, but it's a plane with a normal modifier. The distant mount
is a modified copy of the mountain. The ice plaques are repetitions of another
height_field created with POV and retouched with PCPaintbrush. The water is a
simple bump_maped plane with water finish. A ground fog is over the water to
mix things at distance.

 The ZIP contains all the required files, but I've downsized the tga files for
HFs and MMs, to avoid long upload/download times. The EXE for the external
program is not provided, but the PRG with the code is here, take a loo at your
own risk...

 Finally, sorry to all people from cold places, perhaps (surely) I've done
many mistakes, but I've never seen such landscape or something similar. My
experience with snow is really inexistant.


 Bye!


                                                        Jaime Vives Piqueres
                                                             no-(C) Dec-1997




