EMAIL: gregor.rudolf@irts.si
NAME: Gregor Rudolf
TOPIC: Summer
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.0 beta
TOOLS USED: lparser
RENDER TIME: 12 hours 44 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 150

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Summer is great! You can sunbath under the hot hot sun. You can practice
and swim around. You can scare the strange humans or even bite them off 
an arm or a leg. Summer is great, because the sea is full of food! Of 
course, only if you are a mutant jelly-fish sea monster (MJFSEAM).

Backgrounder: the most notable event of this pretty boring summer was
when someone (supposedly) saw a shark. The people went nuts, the beach
was decorated with funny red and black flags and the sea wasn't as 
crowded as usual. The other notable event was that I (finally) repainted
the house, but believe me, it really wasn't exciting, so I'll stick with 
the shark. As you've probably noticed there aren't any sharks in the 
picture. The main reasons are that:
- sharks are pretty boring animals. They just swim and eat. And they 
can't be still for 12 hours waiting for Povray to finish, while the 
MJFSEAM can do this and more.
- even a child knows how a shark SHOULD look like, but not many people
have seen an animal as magnificient as MJFSEAM.
- and finally, the MJFSEAM is a bit easier to model than a shark. ;)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I used lparser to create the blobby look of MJFSEAM and then edited the
resulting .INC file. There are still a lot of degenerate blob components,
but Povray thankfully skips over the errors. Next thing to do was to 
create the water. I somehow manage to simulate it with a sky_sphere for
environment coloring, a reflective plane for surface (bumps did a better
job than waves/ripples) and a sphere, where dust halo pretends to be 
plankton. And various dirt, that the water is full of. As the scene 
wasn't balanced, I tried to fill it up with air bubbles, but I didn't
succeed to get a realistic look (but they did succeed to put Povray on 
its knees). So I had to create the plants with lparser - BTW, the leaves
on them are based on page 123 of the Algorithmic Beauty Of Plants book.
Finally the lights and textures were tweaked with try, wait and retry 
loop.