TITLE: The sniper
NAME: Jonathan Scudder
COUNTRY: Norway/UK
EMAIL: jonathas@ifi.uio.no
WEBPAGE: www.scudder.no
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 Beta
TOOLS USED: Pen + paper, Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 1 hr 35 mins 35 secs 
HARDWARE USED: 1.4 GHz Athlon, 512MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Finally, after suffering at the hands of the sniper for
three days, the waiting pays off. The sniper is holed up
at the old farmhouse, troops surrounding the building at a
safe distance.

Moving stealthily, the counter-sniper crouches by a tree,
scanning the windows of the building for a clear shot of
the enemy...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The wooden planks/window frame:

All the wooden surfaces were created by rendering an image
of a plain surface with normal wrinkles which are heavily
stretched in one direction. These images were then size and
used to create the planks as height fields. Colouring is
down to procedural textures: different browns at different
depths of the wood, and a bozo layer of moss on top.

The pipe:

Simple copper water pipe, lots of small bumps on the
surface. Would have liked to add much more detail (old
cloth wrappings, grime, etc.), but ran out of time.

The wall:

This is a heightfield based on an image created in Photoshop
(although any paint program would have done), so the cracks,
flakes and bullet holes are actual surface features. The
colouring is just an image map. The interior walls are also
created in the same way (was originally planning a scene in
the house), but the texture is hardly visible in the dark
interior...

The gun:

A fairly simple model of an H&K MSG90 sniper rifle,
reference pictures obtained from the web. The muzzle flash
is an elongated sphere filled with emitting media, with two
densities: a cylinder along the fire path, and a gradient
away from the barrel. This gives the flash a flare which
tapers off fairly quickly.

The sniper: 

The partially hidden sniper is a simple collection of
spheres etc., grouped to giver the impression of someone
hunched over behind the gun. Only part of the head and a
shoulder are slightly visible - after all, a sniper
wouldn't sit in the open :-)

The grass:

Credit to Gilles Tran for his grass macro! The focal blur
created some strange effects in the grass...

The tree:

To save render time on the final image, I first rendered a
simple tree alone, then manipulated this images to end up
with an image map silhouette of the tree. This is the semi-
transparent texture of a box right in front of the camera,
and focal blur is used to give the impression of a
scope/binoculars. The blur didn't really come out as I had
hoped, but anyway...

That's all!