EMAIL: p_chan@shaw.ca
NAME: Philip Chan
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Exodus
COUNTRY: Canada
WEBPAGE: www.ucalgary.ca/~phichan/index.html
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 (Windows)
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop LE 5.0
RENDER TIME: 6s parse, 17m 7s trace, 17m 13s total
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2400+ XP, 256 Mb DDR RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Inspired by some of the images in the Decay round, this
image depicts a future where Earth's resources have been depleted, and the
planet has become polluted.  Three ships are seen departing in search of
"greener pastures" and a better future.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:  Brightness should be set so the bottom half or so of
Earth is black.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The image map for the earth is taken from the following site:

Planet Portal
http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/earth.html

This image is created entirely within POV-Ray's built in text editor.  Most of
the objects in this image are created using Composite Solid Geometry (CSG)
with primitives (spheres, cones, boxes, torii, cylinders, and planes).  The
two exceptions are the terrain (height field) and the plant (sphere_sweeps
and lathes).  The image also makes use of layered textures.

A more detailed and technical description of individual components follows:

Terrain:

The terrain is a height field using an image generated by POV (using the
height field tutorial as a base).  The flattened out sections are created in
terrain_hf.pov by placing cylinders above the plane with the "terrain"
pigment.  The colour of these cylinders represents the height of the terrain
when exodus.pov is rendered.  The cylinders use a pigment map which becomes
transparent as it reaches the edges, to allow the plane to show through, which
gives the smooth transition from rough to smooth sections in the final image.

The plane also uses a pigment map in order to make the terrain slope upwards
as you move away from the camera in the final image.  This effect is amplified
slightly by rotating the height field (and all objects on it) 5 degrees.

The texture is a modified version of the one I used in my Decay entry.  The
modifications were mostly needed to deal with the increased anti-aliasing
settings that were necessary in this image because of the details visible on
the nearest garage.

Rocks:

The small rocks scattered about are placed at random positions.  I initially
tried using a difference to keep the road clear of rocks, but that took way
too long to render.  Instead, I created an object that acts as a "No Rock
Zone."  A random position is generated above the terrain, the trace function
is first used with the No Rock Zone object.  If it hits this object, a new
position is generated, if not, the trace function is used with the height
field to determine the position of the rock.

Earth:

The image was edited in Photoshop to create a "sickly" look before use.  The
colour balance was adjusted to man the oceans make the landmasses less green
and the oceans less blue.  In addition, the image was blurred in photoshop so
that the landmasses wouldn't look so sharp in the render.  A semi-transparent
procedural texture on a larger sphere is use for clouds.  Finally, scattering
media is used to add a slight yellowish glow.

Road Markers:

Because of the sloped terrain, these are placed individually using the trace
function.  The reflective sections use a specular highlight with a high
roughness value.

Buildings:

All CSG.  Nothing too special here.  The plants used the plant from my Decay
entry.  The buildings use layered texture with a metallic base and a fading
texture (another technique from my Decay entry).

Ships:

Pretty much the same as the buildings, with slightly different textures.

Stars:

Starfield macro I created quite a while ago, with the bluish stars removed
because I felt that it created a more melancholy look.