"At the north end of the island, the hills were highest, rising more than two thousand feet above the ocean. The tops of the hills were in fog, but Grant saw rugged cliffs and crashing ocean below. The helicopter climbed above the hills." From "Jurassic Park", by Michael Crichton, 1990 Scene rendered with valley.pov   "Hammond's voice cut off as the pilot said, 'Starting our descent now. Hang on, folks.' The helicopter started down, and immediately they were blanketed in fog. Grant heard a repetitive electronic beeping through his earphones, but he could see nothing at all, then he began dimly to discern the green branches of pine trees, reaching through the mist." From "Jurassic Park", by Michael Crichton, 1990 Scene rendered with wfall.pov

Some comments: I used my own old FORTRAN fractal landscape generator and modified it to write not only the .tga 512x512 height field, but also a file with part of the x-y-z-coordinates of the heigth-field points as a string, which are then used in the POV-Ray program to place the bushes on the height field. The bushes are simple spheres with a partly transparent texture. You can download an example below, also for the waterfall. About 20.000 bushes of three different types (not all visible) in the lower picture render without problems on my Pentium 350/128 Mb, while the 70.000 in the upper picture obviously need some swapping, but still render in one or two hours. The clouds and fog media take their time to render rather than the bushes. To avoid reading copyright instructions of model files on commercial servers, I made my own simple CSG helicopter. I knew that it would be small in the picture, and so I omitted all details. Some photographs: I took a picture of a Sikorsky S-76 once in Sweden, and I had that in mind when I wrote heli.inc, although a different helicopter is used in the well known movie . It is perhaps interesting to compare a picture of Iao Needle on Maui, Hawai'i with the upper rendered scene. I took it in 1998. In 1997, we were on Kaua'i, Hawai'i, and I could take a picture of Mana Waipuna Falls on a helicopter tour. This was the location where the helicopter lands in the "Jurassic Park" movie when the actors fly to Isla Nublar in the beginning of the movie. You can still imagine where the helipad has been in the movie. The waterfall does not look so big in photo, but you will change your mind when you see it in the movie together with the helicopter. It is beautiful, but of course, for this second rendered scene, I made a lot of compromises for easier rendering. If you would like to see more pictures of Hawai'i, this click brings you to the hiking trails directory of our homepage. Don't get lost.

Two files to download: If you are interested in bushes or waterfalls, I would suggest to download the test - files "bushtest.pov" or "falltest.pov" as an example rather than the scene files. They are small, should be easy to render, contain the essential features, and I think they are readable, while for the scene files further below, I spent only time to improve the pictures and nothing to improve readability. And the textures of the bushes and the waterfall are better in the test-files than in the scene files of the pictures above. Download bushtest.pov here, and it should render a picture like this: Download falltest.pov here, and it should render a picture like this: Have fun to use that waterfall in your own scenes, if you like.

Sources for the two scenes at the top of the page: It is not so easy to make everything available what you would need to render the pictures on top of the page. As I have the xyz-coordinates for the bushes in a separate file, you would need that files, but they are too big to store them on our homepage. So if you would download the files below, you could render the scenes, but only without bushes. It is obvious that I should write a small program that produces a list of xyz-coordinates with certain rules just from a tga height-field, so I could plant bushes on any given height field. So far, I hope you still have fun with the small test-files.

POVRAY scene: valley.pov wfall.pov	*.inc-files: heli.include bush0.include bush1.include bush2.include media1.include media2.include	height field: fall.tga valley.tga
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