making of "The Pool"

This description should give some insight in details and techniques of this scene.

The image is to some extent a demonstration of the features of coming POV-Ray 3.5.1 and MegaPOV 1.1. The MegaPOV manual will contain some more details on the new features.

This scene is an experiment for dealing with high contrasts. In synthetical images we often use lower contrasts than there would be in nature to make the image fit the limited dynamic range of the computer monitor. It often looks quite agreeable this way since photographic films as well as out own eye tend to compress high contrasts as well.

But calculating the images in a raytracer also makes it possible to use realistic light intensities and calculate a low dynamic range image for viewing or printing afterwards. This way we can produce different views of the same scene - like when making a photo with several exposures to correctly reproduce dark and bright parts in view - without rendering the scene several times with different lighting.

The following images show such a set of 'exposure settings' for the pool scene.

very dark	dark	bright	very bright

image in Radiance high dynamic range format

The lighting is not really physically accurate but i think it demonstrates it sufficiently.

Here are some closeup views of objects in the scene.

The wood cabinet on the right side and the bank on the left are created with the IsoWood include file.

The towel is created with the SimPOV/Mechsim mechanics simulation system.
The glass sculpture is using a simple random growth algorithm for building a blob shape.

That's it about this scene, if you have further questions feel free to ask.

Christoph Hormann August 11, 2003