TITLE: fishtank
NAME: Thomas H Lake
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: tlake@home.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fishtank.jpg
ZIPFILE: fishtank.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Rhino, Pov-Ray, Photoshop (for heightfield and adding the
copyright symbol)

RENDER TIME: 
    Parse Time - 1Min 6Sec Render Time 21Hr 26Min 6Sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        Could there be anything more relaxing than staring at a little 
piece of the sea right in your own home, late at night?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


        Everything you see in the scene, with the exception of the plants
and fish has been modeled in Moray, including the textures.

Walls:

        The main walls are just a simple CSG of a large box and a slightly
smaller box. The staircase wall is the union of a prism (called a translational
sweep in Moray) and a box.

Banister:

        The posts are made up of a union of 2 boxes and a lathe. The railing at
the
bottom is a box. The top hand rail, this can be seen at the top left hand corner
of
the scene, is another prism.

Stairs:

        I only created one set of stairs; a union between a Superquadric
Ellipsoid,
for the step, and a box for the skirt, not sure that is the right term. Then I
simply
copied the stair 5 times. This is the same for the sunken living room step at
the bottom
of the image.

Fish tank stand:

        This is just a simple union and difference of many boxes. Its hard to
see but there
are holes in the side of it cut by boxes and prisms.

Fish tank:

        The fish tank itself is made of 5 narrow boxes, the glass panes, and a
large box inside
for the water. This box was textured with a water texture with an IOR of 1.1.

Gravel:

        The gravel is a simple heighfield created by the clouds filter in
Photoshop.

Fish:

        I modeled the fish in Rhino. I actually took pictures of the fish in my
tank and used those
as backgrounds to model them. They are simple lathes, though they took me a long
time. The fins are also
simple laths.

Plants:
        The plants are also modeled in Rhino, they are single rail sweeps.

Image in back of tank:
        I got the image for the back of the tank off of a wallpaper site on the
net, this guy had some amazing
images. It's a little hard to make out in this image, partly due to the
refraction and scaling, it is actually
a beautiful image of a coral reef. The image map is on a Bezier patch, you can
see it peeling off a little at the
upper corner. I wanted it to peel of a little, just to add a little something to
the image.