EMAIL: jguthkelch@netscape.net
NAME: John Guthkelch (Doctor John)
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Sea Mist, Western Isles
COUNTRY: U.K.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: gvim, The Gimp, imagination and a bottle of Lagavulin (as well as beer)
RENDER TIME: 4330 seconds for 1024x384 image
HARDWARE USED: Home-brewed P-166 with 32 meg RAM and two clunky ST3660A (520
meg) HDDs! I'm still also using my seven-year-old 15" monitor - gamma in the
range of 3.5 - 3.7 (or thereabouts)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: What can I say? The islands where the best malt whiskies in
the world are distilled. It's late autumn and the snow is just starting to dust
the tops.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was an exercise in minimalism.
There are precisely two frame-level objects:
1. The Land Mass - A complex function using 3d-noise. It produces a fractal-ish
ridge running along the z-axis.
2. The Sea - The standard Povray ridged-mf function used as a surface normal.

To start with, I put the two objects together and rendered a view from directly
overhead to produce a map of the 'island'. This was edited using The Gimp and a
grid was overlaid. This allowed me to precisely choose the best camera position
and look_at target.
Next, the view was rendered using these camera settings and the colour was
added to the land mass. Experimenting with this took two weeks of playing around
until a typpongg-arrer <grin> produced precisely the effect I was looking for.
Third stage, play with the sea surface to get a suggestion of white-caps and get
its reflectivity and colour just right. This took a week (and a day of studying
the surface of several pints of beer as it slowly went flat. OK, only a couple of
the pints had the chance to do it).
Fourth, add in the surface fog to get precisely the distance perspective I
wanted and ...
fifth, add a pre-prepared sky that I'd made earlier for another project.

I didn't bother to use anti-aliasing because I'm pretty sure it would have
messed up my sea surface.

Finally, I have provided the source code in the zip file in two formats. The
standard .pov file has Unix line endings and the .html file is for those poor
mortals who are still using Mr Gates' excuse for an OS and wish to inspect the
code (and incidentally see what it looks like on a real editor i.e vim - sorry,
emacs folks).

BTW I haven't yet updated my pov.vim file to reflect POV 3.5 syntax so if
anyone out there has done so, I would be grateful for a copy. Mail it to me at
the address above and, provided that you live somewhere near to me (near London
Docklands), I'll buy you a drink.