EMAIL: turbosi@earthlink.net NAME: D. Larson TOPIC: Forces of Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Ducks on Parade COUNTRY: US WEBPAGE: http://turbosi.net RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 TOOLS USED: POVTree, Anim8or, Terragen, World Machine, PoseRay RENDER TIME: 31Hrs, 33Mins, 16Secs (1280x1024) HARDWARE USED: AMD 1700, 1024Meg memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Ducks on Parade. or The Call of Nature DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was just an idea that popped into my mind. Along with the twist on reality I wanted a strong interplay between the bright yellow of the rubber ducks and the subtle fall tones of the changing season. Unfortunately I've only seen this image on TFT monitors so I'm having problems deciding about the colors used. Anywho...some basic stats for the image are... Two height fields are used for the landscape. These were originally created in Terragen and transfered to WorldMachine where they were then exported to POVRay. The rocks in the river are isosurface functions placed by a simple trace. There are 800 rocks. The trees and shrubs were created in POV Tree and exported as meshes. The plants were also placed with a trace function with a random gen- erator. There are 150 foreground trees, 275 background trees and 5000 shrubs. The leaves are meshes created in Anim8or and converted by PoseRay. 75,000 leaves were scattered by the trace function and again a random function wqas used to vary the colors. The ducks... now this turned out to be a challenge. The original duck was modeled in Anim8or. The original subdivided duck exeded the limits of Anim8or and had to be remodeled to a lower triangle count. The duck contains around 50,000 triangles. I created a difference of the water surface and foreground height field and this was used for a trace function to place the ducks and leaves on the water. A mix of 300 ducks and leaves were looped and placed with the trace function. The dead tree in the river is another mesh created with POV Tree. There are 7 fish in the river even though only one is really visible. The fish are a simple mesh I found online and they were placed by hand. Orignally I tried using a media haze for the fog but my render times dropped to <5 PPS. Since there was very little difference in the final image when scaled down to 250k I opted to use simple fog. This is the first image I've submitted to IRTC so any critisism, good or bad is appreciated.