EMAIL: glenn@mccarters.net
NAME: Glenn McCarter
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
TITLE: "Vuaqava Island Resort"
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/gmccarter/vauqava
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.5
TOOLS USED:
  POV-Ray editor (all text coding)
  hamaPatch (golf clubs and boat hulls)
  Pose2Pov (convert models to mesh2)
  WorldMachine (distant terrain)
  ColorPicker (define RGB colors )
  Paint Shop Pro (heightfields, convert image to JPEG, add signature )


RENDER TIME: 17hr 26min (with radiosity and 2 light groups)
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III - 800 Mhz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Bula! (Welcome!) Come to Vuaqava Island Resort!  Just a short boat cruise from Fiji's capital Suva, our world-class resort is ready to welcome you with sunny skies and beautiful beaches.

Here, unique volcanic formations millions of years old help create one of the most exotic golf courses on the face of the Earth!  Bring your golf clubs, relax, and leave behind your fear of heights as you play a round.  Tropical vegetation surrounds you as the front nine holes wind their way into the highlands.  But the back nine is truly memorable -- have you ever needed to take an elevator to get to the green?

Vuaqava Island Resort -- golfer's paradise


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Most of the early development involved arranging the overall scene.  Where would this fantasy golf course be located?  Around a volcano?  Near Lake Tahoe?  In the Gobi Desert?  I finally settled on a locale (the South Pacific) and a layout (a cove or lagoon).  I envisioned the unusual rock formations in this cove as originally being volcanic vents.  Over the milennia, the sea eroded away the softer rock, leaving pillars of magma: some balanced precariously, others toppled over.

Much of this scene is constructed with heightfields.  However, most of them are not oriented in the usual vertical direction!  Most objects and height fields have procedural textures (like using the slope pattern to add greenery to flat areas), while some have image maps drawn by hand in Paint Shop Pro.  The water uses an interior with a fade_distance and fade_color to blend from nearly transparent at the beachfront to a rich blue in the deep areas.  POV-Ray's new variable reflection is also essential to making the water look realistic.

I used an 80-degree camera angle in order to capture the panoramic width of the scene.  This also helped show the vertical height -- to achieve a slight sense of vertigo by looking nearly straight down a rocky hillside, while still keeping the horizon and sky in view.  I needed to perspective-correct several objects by artificially tilting them to keep them upright in the final render.  A little fog adds a sense of distance.

I tried to add a few interesting details in each quadrant of the scene to provide scale and keep the eye entertained.  The palm trees and walkway use two of my favorite new POV-Ray features: sphere_sweeps and splines.  The boat hulls are patch objects made in hamaPatch, while the rest of the boats, marina, and hotel are CSG.

This is a "heavy" scene, so I used several tricks to save memory and rendering time.  Most of the plant leaves are just image maps on stretched spheres or torii.  The tee grass is a few hundred thousand triangles prerendered and image-mapped onto a box.  The distant tree clumps are complex procedural textures on simple spheres.

Everything in the scene was custom-made for this IRTC entry, except for a grassy plant and rock which I had made earlier.  The zipfile includes everything necessary to re-render the scene, but I substituted lower-resolution bitmaps to save filespace.


Acknowledgments & Trivia
Vuaqava is an actual island in Fiji, but any resemblance of this image to its real terrain is purely coincidental!
Thanks to the Fiji government for sharing maps & other info online http://www.fiji.gov.fj/fijifacts/maps/index.shtml.
The resort design was inspired by a mansion in Boca Raton Florida.
A hearty thanks to the POV-Ray Team, without whom I would probably still be using watercolors.
Overall, the image has 144 palm trees, 79 height fields, seven boats, five people, and a Coke machine.
I had plenty of fun creating Vuaqava.  Hope you enjoyed viewing it!
