Vision Quest Wind Farm 

Pincher Creek, Alberta

By Jennnifer Baji

I choose to do the windmills that are seen in the Pincher Creek- Crowsnest Area. 

This is the picture that I decided to model my own picture after.  It was found online at

http://www.pincher-creek.com/windenergy/

 

The whole project sits on a yellow bumpy plane which uses a color map and a texture called crackle.  It has five shadow less lights over it to create lighter patches.  The next thing I created was the fence posts using cylinders colored brown using a color map and a gradient y texture, to make them look like wood.

The bushes, and darker grass were created using a grass patch borrowed from  Pov Ray Cyclopedia of Solutions at: http://www.spiritone.com/~english/cyclopedia/grass.html

This tool had some wonderful features such as a plot point mode which allowed the user to see where the grass would be without having to render the grass itself.  The grass was the cause of most of the rendering time of just over an hour and a half.

I created three different versions of a windmill to plot, so that the position of the blades could be different and look more realistic. The mountains were created using height fields. The height fields were created using image.pov, which is provided in the pov ray tutorial that can be downloaded on their website. It was scaled in the x, y, and z directions to create the three different types of mountains/hills that are seen in the picture.

I found the hardest part of this project was to get the colors to look right, as well as get the mountains to look like mountains. The lighting was hard to do, if it was to high it did hit the front of the fence posts making them look too dark, if it was to low the windmills did not have enough definition. If I were to redo this project i would have focused on one object (the windmills) instead of trying to match the entire picture.