EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net NAME: Robert Lee TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Ice Cave COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV 3.5 TOOLS USED: World Maker, IfranView, Windows Paint, BioWin, Little Gray Cells RENDER TIME: about 15 hrs HARDWARE USED: 1.7 Ghz Pentium on Windows XP IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Frozen Moment or Moment Frozen? You decide. The scene is set in a cave, adjacent to an inter-mountain glacier. Frozen Moment: This might be a picture of a frozen moment. The sudden onset of an ice age traps ancient life forms in a frozen landscape forever. Water, in mid-drip, is frozen solid. Cooling water vapor condenses into fog and ice forms on the cave walls and floor. Moment Frozen: This might be a picture of a moment frozen in time. As an ice age comes to an end, ancient life forms begin to thaw as the ice recedes. The thawing stalactite is caught in mid drip. The thawing ice forms an ice fog that settles to the cave floor. Is the life form near the front of the cave responding to sunlight? This is my third IRTC entry. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Terrain: I started with some mountains made with World Maker, placed them in the background, and applied a distant-mountain type texture. These mountains were reused from my previous entry. Cave: I created an image with MS Paint showing blobs of black, white, and gray. I created a second image by inverting, taking the negative, of the first. These two images were massaged a bit and then turned into height fields and aligned, one above the other, to make a cave. Most time was spent on creating a realistic texture for the cave. It has elements of rock and ice. Cave Floor: The cave floor and snow field outside, is a box upon which the cave height fields sit. The box is textured with an ice / snow gradient x texture. Cave Fog: Cave fog is created by filling a hollow, transparent box with emission media. Stalactite: This is a sphere sweep object coated with the cave texture. A second sphere sweep object, slightly larger but the same shape as the first, is textured as clear ice. A small sphere is appended to the end of the stalactite to form a drip. Life Forms: The ancient life forms were created with the program BioWin. Output from BioWin, POV source code, was incorporated into the scene and textures were added. Clouds: Being a meteorologist, I wanted the clouds to look right. Thirty, hollow, scaled spheres were filled with emission and scattering media and combined into a blob object. Fog: Ground fog was added to show moisture - condensing or evaporating. Frozen Splash: The icy splash is the difference between a blob object, containing several sphere components, and a box that is textured using a glass texture to make it look like ice. Lighting: There is one point light source to light the outside terrain. There is an area light near the front of the cave shining in to create the soft shadows. There are two very dim fill lights. One on the right and the other on the left near the front of the cave to illuminate a bit of the cave not directly illuminated by the area light. Radiosity: I used fairly high quality radiocity settings: pretrace_start 0.08 pretrace_end 0.005 count 400 error_bound 0.1 recursion_limit 5 media on normal on always_sample off save_file "CaveRad3" IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.