TITLE: The Lonely Buoy
NAME: Daniel Nilsson
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: irtc@daniel-nilsson.com
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lifebuoy.jpg
ZIPFILE: lifebuoy.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.6.1

RENDER TIME: 
    43 minutes 28 seconds @ +W1600 +H800 +AM2 +A0.3

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 2GHz 512Mb


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I've been thinking of entering the IRTC for some time but have never
had any good idea for an image. When I saw the topic I came up with
the idea of a lifebuoy in a very dry desert. With no water for
hundreds of miles the buoy must be really useless in this location and
could not be more out of place.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


First some credits:

I used Jaime Vives Piqueres' Lightsys IV for lighting.
The sky is made with the skylight include by Philippe Debar, modified
by Ive for the use with Lightsys IV.

The only light source is the sun and it's an area light with realistic size.
Radiocity was used with Radiocity_OutdoorLight settings.

The desert is an isosurface with a function that involves f_ridge_mf
and f_noice3d. I sampled the sand color from a picture i found with
google and used it as a simple pigment. I had to reverse gamma correct
the sampled rgb values to make the desert show up with the intended
color.

The lifebuoy is a scaled torus. I used a bozo texture_map to blend a
clean, somewhat shiny, red white checker texture and a dirty brown
texture to make it look like it has been in the desert for some time.

The ropes around the buoy are hand placed sphere_sweeps with a bozo
pigment to make them look dirty and a quilted normal to make them look
like ropes (not visible at the scale in the submitted image).

The pole is a Round_Box_Union with T_Wood3 and a wood normal and the
thing that holds the buoy is a CSG with a rather bad attempt at a
cracked chrome material (luckely not visible at this scale).


