TITLE: Lightning Strike
NAME: MIke Ferris
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: mikey_eff@yahoo.ca
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lighteni.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3, MakeTree and MakeGrass macros from Gilles Tran, Microsoft
Photo Editor (for conversion to JPEG)

RENDER TIME: 
    21 hours 52 minutes 11.0 seconds (78731 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    500 MHz AMD K6-2 with 384 MB RAM, 733 MHz Pentium III with 256 MB
RAM -- both used for editing, modelling, and test renders; K6-2 used for final
render

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    Main Tree - Created with MakeTree and saved to INC 
        files which were then included into the POV scene 
        description. The leaves cast no shadow so as 
        brighten the overall tree.

    Lightning Bolt - The main arm of the bolt consists of 
        20 sphere_sweep objects of increasing radius. As 
        the radius increases the colour goes from white to 
        yellow to transparent with a high ambient finish.

        A bounding box is used to clip the sphere_sweep so 
        as to show the inner colouring. The bolt casts no 
        shadow.

        The branches of the bolt are further instances of 
        the main arm rotated, scaled, and translated into 
        position.

    Hill - Heightfield generated using the heightfield 
        tutorial in the POV-Ray documentation and clipped 
        to get a single hill from the resulting landscape.

    Grass - A total of 40 different blades created using 
        the MakeBlade macro in Gilles Tran's MakeGrass.pov 
        file. An XZ grid was generated with some randomness 
        added to the position of each point. At each grid
        point, one of the 40 blades was picked at random 
        and the trace()function was then used to place the 
        blade on the hill. A total of 25,600 blades of 
        grass are on the hill.

    Rocks - A single rock object was created using Moray 
        and saved to an INC file. The rock consists of two 
        bezier patches. The trace() function was used to 
        place two instances of the rock, one rotated and 
        scaled to appear different than the other.

    Background Trees & Hills - These are instances of the 
        main tree and hill (without grass or rocks), 
        textured to be black so as to look like a 
        silhouette and scaled/rotated for individuality.

    Sparks - 2,024 very small reflective spheres positioned 
        randomly along multiple parabolas. The spheres cast 
        no shadow. The parabolas are positioned so as to 
        intersect with the lightning bolt's point of        
        impact and are randomly sized and rotated.

    Smoke - A hollow cone with media.

    Impact Flash - A hollow sphere with media positioned at 
        the point of impact.

    Light Sources - There are two, both of them coloured 
        Yellow.

        (1) Positioned just behind the point of impact to 
            light the impact flash sphere and backlight the 
            tree.
        (2) Dimmed to 0.6 the intensity of (1) and 
            positioned at a distance above and to the left 
            for a bit of extra light.

    Ground Plane - A simple XZ plane with a dark, wrinkled 
        texture.

    Sky - An XZ plane with texture to make clouds.

Scene rendered with anti-aliasing and radiosity.
Total number of objects in scene: 287045
Peak memory used: 321485856 bytes