EMAIL: no13@ozemail.com.au
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Playground
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~no13
RENDERER USED: Povray for windows v3.1
TOOLS USED: Spatch, Paintshop Pro.
RENDER TIME: 10 hours 27 minutes
HARDWARE USED: P133 with 64Mb or ram. NT4 os.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

It's more than just a school of whales.

In creating this image I decided to try and capture something other than just the representation 
of an object. I've tried to capture an emotion. Which one ? It's an emotion from my childhood
and one specifically related to the topic of SCHOOL. 

Primary school. Age 7-10. Its morning on a glorious spring day. You can see the sun shining on
the playground through the window next to you. The teacher is droning on. You can't here what she
is saying because your mind is already outside. The bell rings, it's morning recess ! You charge
out the classroom door, down the hall and into that spring morning. Your friends are around you 
and the fun has just started. THIS IS THE MOMENT.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I used that marvellous program Spatch to model the whales. The model went through several stages
of development and modification. Even now I'm not totally happy with it. I've included the final
model "whale5.spt" in the zip file for those who would like to play with it (it's also included
as a pov object as well). 

The textures of the whale were much harder to resolve. I first tried using a texture_map to band
various different textures across the whale body. This worked well but I soon found out that you
can't layer textures over a texture_map. (should have read those docs first!) Finally I took the
texture map I'd created and rendered it out as a large image for use as an image_map instead.
I've included the pov file I used for creating the base image_map with the ZIP file.

I eventually broke the whale model into two parts, the main body and the fins. This was so I 
could apply different image_maps to each. The fins use the planar mapping while the body uses
cylindrical mapping. To create the barnacles and white strips of the body area I painted onto
the original image_map using paintshop pro.

I also used paintshop pro to create a 256 grey scale of the image map. Once cleaned up I used it
as a bump_map over the whale body to elevate the barnacle areas. I haven't included the images
used for the images maps in the ZIP archive. They are TGA files and all very large. But I am 
glad to post them direct to anyone who is interested in using them.

The ocean environment is a simple combination of random spheres (the bubbles) and a box (the water
surface). I didn't use a plane for the water beacuse I like the effect you get from using a box,
(two sets of effects, one from each surface). 

The atmospheric effects were much harder to control. The scene has several spotlights that
interact with the atmosphere, a main sky light that doesn't ineteract with the atmosphere and
a fog definition. To help control the definition of the spotlights I used a background box that
covered the extent of the image with a filter value of 0.9. This gave the spotlight atmospheric
effect substance over the areas where there would have otherwise being only the fog effect.
The exact locations of the spotlights took many tests to resolve as did the final values for the
atmosphereic effect. 

Finally I went back over all the finish statements within the scene and adjusted the ambient,
diffuse, phong and specular settings to balance the image.