TITLE: rr_snowplane.jpg

NAME: Roman Reiner
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: limdaepl@gmx.de
TOPIC: Out Of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rr_snowp.jpg
ZIPFILE: rr_snowp.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.6


TOOLS USED: 
    none


RENDER TIME: 


  Parse Time:    2 minutes 50 seconds (170 seconds)
  Render Time:  15 minutes 20 seconds (920 seconds)
  Total Time:   18 minutes 10 seconds (1090 seconds)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 2.6 GHz, 640 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A cactus standing in a frosty ice and snow-covered landscape.

When thinking of the topic my first intention was not to make it too unrealistic
or even
surrealistic. That has to do with the fact that I do not like surrealismus very
much and
that I do not consider it as very creative since the objects in an surrealistic
image are
usually out of their usual place in some kind.
Of course one could say my image is unrealistic as well but one will see what
climatic 
changes will bring ;-)

The funny thing of my interpretation is that you can wonder both how the cactus
came into 
that frosty region and how the snow and ice came into an region where there grow
cactuses.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started with the cactus. The body is a merge of the simple primitives sphere,
cylinder 
and torus, represented through isosurface-functions. The grooves are cut into
the surface by 
subtracting a gradient pigment-function warped spherically or torodially
respectively around
the primitives.
The thorns are cone-objects placed by using trace.
The blades of grass are simple CSG-Objects. Use a few hundred of them and you
get a nice
bundle of grass growing around the cactus.

After that I started with the landscape. I formerly used two height fields. One
almost plane
one in the foreground and a second one in the background which should form some
mountains. 
What you can see now is the result of placing some scaling, rotating and
translating
statements for the second height field in the wrong order. I would like to
apologize for the
fact that I had made such a nice shape just by accident and I'm sure I couldn't
have done
it "by hand". I have no idea how the cracks in the front came in there for
instance. But it
has also caused a lot of problems when trying to place the falling snow which
I'll mention
in the next paragraph.
Later I recognized that the first height field isn't visible anymore and I took
it out.

The snowflakes consist partly of some tiny media-containing spheres and mainly
of a bozo-
pattered semitransparent sphere around the camera. Second solution isn't very
nice and my
intention was it to use only the first one but there occured several problems.
Firstly I
couldn't prevent the spheres from causing artifacts where they overlapped and
secondly the
distances in the image do not behave as it might look. The top of the mountain
in the back
for instance is approximately four times nearer than its foot and almost at the
same
distance as the cactus. So you can guess that it is very difficult to archive
useable
results.

As the contrast between the cactus and the landscape was too big I added some
icicles
and a frosty texture.

