EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
NAME: Bob Franke
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Night Fright
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02
TOOLS USED: Nathan Kopp's NKFlare, Poser2, Keith Rules' Wcvt2Pov,
John Beale's HeighField Lab, PhotoStyler & the POV editor.
RENDER TIME: 7 min 28 sec (how embarrassing)
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 w/ 48 Mb Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

What a deal! In 1967 and 1968 my country treated be to an all
expenses paid one year vacation to Southeast Asia.  This image
is essentially a self portrait of an early recollection of
that time.  The landscape is illuminated with flares dropped
by the helicopter.  The Image shows a soldier peering through
a starlite scope mounted on an M16.  In the distance, a Cobra
gun ship is firing its laser like mini-guns while receiving
some machine-gun ground fire.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The height field for the landscape was created with John Beale's
HF-Lab.  I set up a batch file and just executed it over and
over until I got a landscape I liked.  A green pigment with
bumps was added to give the appearance of a dense jungle.

The flare trails are marble patterns on a thin box.  This is
clipped at a three degree angle to give the appearance of dropped
flares from a moving helicopter.  Just behind this is black box
to fill in the background.  Then I used Nathan Kopp's NKFlare to
create the flares at the bottom of each trail.

An overall fog and a ground fog was added for depth and the smoke
of combat.

The soldier was created with Poser2 and converted for POV use
with Keith Rules' Wcvt2Pov

The Cobra helicopter was downloaded from the 3-D Cafe and also
converted with Wcvt2Pov.

The helmet, can of pop, M16, Starlite Scope and bottle of insect
repellent are constructive solid geometry with spheres, cylinders,
boxes and superellipsoids.  Inside the scope there is a green
spotlight.

PhotoStyler was used for the jpeg conversion.

To save space, the helicopter, Poser and the tga height field
files are not included with the code.