TITLE: Walking with dinosaurs NAME: Christophe BOUFFARTIGUE COUNTRY: France EMAIL: christophe.bouffartigue@libertysurf.fr WEBPAGE: nop. TOPIC: Wilderness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: cbwild.jpg ZIPFILE: cbwild.zip RENDERER USED: WinMegapov 0.5 TOOLS USED: prog. 3DWin (by Thomas Baier, http://www.stmuc.com/thbaier/tools.html) UVMApper (by Steve Cox, http://home.pb.net/~stevecox/) OBJuvPOV (by Cliff Bowman, http://www.who3d.cwc.net/Models.html) The GIMP (by Peter Mattis & Spencer Kimball, http://www.gimp.org/) macros & inc. Reorient macro (by John Vansickle, http://users.erols.com/vansickl/povray.htm) Tile Generator (by Chris Colefax, http://www.geocities.com/ccolefax/) Stone Generator. (by Jaime Vives Piqueres, http://www.ctav.es/jaime/) maketree & mgrass (by Gilles Tran, http://www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/) TomTrees (by Thom Aust, http://www.koeln.netsurf.de/~thom.aust/) RENDER TIME: 11h 18mn HARDWARE USED: Pentium MMX @180MHz (!!!) 48 Mo RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ... Wilderness... Places where nature holds sway and man is unknown or insignificant... Hum... not much places like these on earth, nowadays... Deep oceans ??? Not much light, not a good subject for render... Deep jungle ??? Huh ??? Dr Livingstone, I presume ??? Sunbaked deserts ?? Some Bedouins live here... Isolated icecaps ?? Ooops, there's a scientific campsite, right in the middle... Man, man, man everywhere.... So, let's jump into our time machine, and back to the fut... huh.. to the past, when dinosaurs walked the earth (like they said in "Jurassic Park"... ;)), and when man didn't kick up a fuss..... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well..., my first landscape (except some seascapes when i first discover POV-Ray some years ago). Here we go... Background: ----------- The far mountains and the (less) far hills are height fields generated with POV (essentially a wrinkles pattern, with several spotlights, see hf1.pov and hf2.pov). The mountains are textured using the slope pattern from MegaPOV (slope dependant pattern). The sky is a simple textured plane. There's also a constant fog (which gives the gradient of the sky...). The ground and water: --------------------- For the ground, I've generated a big height field (hfsol.pov), with a torrent running in the middle. Then, I've cropped an interesting part of this image, and make it tileable with Chris Colefax 's Tile Generator. So the ground is constitued of 6 times the same height field (tiled in the direction of tbe viewing). The grass on the ground is a simple texture. The water is a simple plane, with the right texture (I hope). Tons of little spheres were dropped on the ground, near the water level. The grass blades in the river were made with Gilles Tran's MakeBlade macro (mgrass.pov), and placed in groups with a little macro I wrote. The stones were made with Jaime Vives Piqueres' Stone Generator, which he wrote for his "Water" IRTC entry (and first place ;) ), with a slightly different texture. The trees: ---------- First, I've rendered some trees using Gilles Tran's Maketree, but the parsing time and memory consumption disuaded me from using them directly in the scene. So, I've used the same trick as Robert J. Becraft in his "Garden" IRTC entry: image maps !!! The trees were rendered individually, (on a black background, without antialiasing, orthographic camera), the color resolution was reduced to 8 bits (palette), the images were mapped on very thin boxes, always perpendicular to the camera direction, and the background color was made totally transparent. Trees were created using Gilles Tran's maketree.pov, and Thom Aust's tomtree.inc. I didn't have much time to find documentation about paleobotanic (I found some fossils...not very excinting...), so the trees are probably some beautiful anachronisms.... The Fern: --------- In order to mask an empty area in the lower right corner of the picture, I wrote some macros to make a fern-like plant. It is made of a collection of mesh, so it doesn't use too much memory, and renders reasonnably fast. Source is available in fougere.inc (sorry, comments in french..., I'll probably rewrite and make it available in some objects collection... later... (write on the to-do list)). The dinosaurs: -------------- The element that make the place wild.... All are meshes found on 3Dcafe (brachyosaurus by Cyberware, plateausorus by David Gordiano (actually, a plateausorus didn't look like that, but that was the name the author gave to his mesh....), pterodactyl by Platinum). The pterodactyl and brachyosorus mesh were not textured, and some maps were provided with the plateausorus model, but texture info were lost in the conversion process. So, all models were converted into OBJ file type, using 3Dwin. Then, UV map information was added to the OBJ file, thanks to UVMapper. The image maps were created with The GIMP (under linux), and the OBJ files were converted into Megapov mesh2 format with OBJuvPOV. Thanks to Gilles Tran and Fabian Brau for explaining to me this way of processing. For further informations, source is provided, as always (well, it's now my third submission to the IRTC, so I think I can write "as always" ;P). The mesh2 files are not available in the zip (more than 3Mo zipped), but the original models are available on 3Dcafe, and you can find all the tools I used for converting them (URL available on the top of this file)... Most image maps can be rendered with Megapov (source provided), and the others (map for dinosaurs) are available as PNG. I would also like to thank everyone at nzn.fr.3D.pov (news.newz.net) for their advices and support...