EMAIL: s.tessarin@tin.it

NAME: Stefano Tessarin

TOPIC: Decay

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: The New Owner

COUNTRY: Italy

WEBPAGE: N/A

RENDERER USED: povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: PSP 
	    Terragen
	    3ds2pov
	    lightsys.inc by Jaime Vives Piqueres
            grass.inc & tree.inc by Gilles Tran

RENDER TIME: pretrace 1h, 10m (read below)
	     trace 41h, 30m

HARDWARE USED: P3 700 256Mb RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This image show how nature can at least wins against man. Where once the majesty of man-like gods ruled, now tress, grass and animals live in peace. There, where once was home for Mars or Venus now it's the confortably house for a lonley cat.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I used a lot of techniques to finsh this entry.

1 - Terrain
With Terragen I build the terrain and saved it as a .raw file. Then I used PSP to convert it as a grayscale tga and used it in a Heightfield. To speed up the raytracing I raytraced the ground texture in Terragen as well, using an ortho camera with the same  light coming from the same place then in PovRay (well, I tried...) after severals tries I achieved a not-so-good result, but it's the best I could :-)). This Terragen image has been then mapped  onto the heightfield.

2 - Vegetation
I created 3 kind of background trees and 4 kind of grass with tree.inc and grass.inc by Gill Tran respectively. I then "platend" them onto the heightfield using the trace command in conjunction with different random macros. A total of about 4.000 trees and about 10.000 grass patches have been planted.
Both textures came from actual leaf and grass pictures from wich I grabbed the colour using the dropper tool in psp.
The foreground tree is a Gilles Tran macro tree as well. It required almost 1 hour to be created.

3 - Light 
Light is the wonderfull lighsys.inc by Jaime Vives Piqueres. I made several tries but at least I achieved a good result IMHO.

4 - Temple
All the colum and the front end of the temple is done with my macro archi.inc (I will share it someday!!) and it's all CSG and the broken colums are isosurface. To speed up rendering I'm planning to convert everything to mesh (probably in the far future :-))

5 - Cat
The cat is a free 3ds object found at www.3d-cafe.com I exported using the good-old dos program 3ds2pov. 

6 - Rendering
I rendered the image in two phases. The first trace was done at 320x240 with simplified objects only to save radiosity data, then I traced at final resolution (with all the regular objects) loading the radiosity data saved before. Go to see Jaime Vives Piqueres site if you want to know more (www.ignorancia.org).
The camera has a small focal blur to add depth.
If you're still reading you are a great one :-)