TITLE: Food Chains 101
NAME: Dale E. Cieslak
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dcieslak@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.tripod.com/~DCieslak
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: food101.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    approximately 50 min.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 100 MHz, 2MB Matrox Millenium

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The worm, seeing a fish for the first time, says, "I'm new here.  Wanna do
lunch?"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Ever wonder what a worm thinks when it sees a fish for the first (and last :))
time?
Well, you shouldn't.  Worms can't see. :) In spite of that, I used that as the
central
theme for my IRTC entry.  The fish, worm, hook, bottle, and line were all
modeled
completely in sPatch.  The worm, hook, and line were in the same file, but the
fish
and the bottle were in their own separate files.  Putting each object on its
own
sPatch layer made assigning textures very easy.  I was quite happy, because this
is
my first decent image resulting from sPatch.  I drew the texture and bump maps
for
both the fish and the worm in Photoshop.  The bottle, hook, and line were just
given
simple textures.  The sea floor is a heightfield, generated using the Photoshop
"Clouds"
filter and blurred.  The texture is a 'bumped' using the normal modifier, and
the
color is the Starfield texture modified to kinda look like sand.  I added blue-
green fog to get the murky water look.  I used multiple lights from above,
hoping to
get better caustics (they don't work well with area lights), but they came out
very
subtle.  I have another light (very dim) coming directly from the viewer to
lighten
up the shadows and to make the overhead lighting less harsh.  Unfortunately, I
think
that also contributed to the washed-out caustics, but overall, I think the
underwater
feeling is pretty good, considering the cartoony feel of the image.

