An offshore lighthouse in Brittany

This is a attempt to model the "La Jument" lighthouse some miles offshore of Brittany (western France).
I wanted to recreate that illumination we can see after a gale when sunlight hits the foreground while background is darkened by a cloud.
The firekeeper is standing at the top of the tower, waiting for the relief boat after 3 lonely weeks enduring storms and 10 meters waves...

This scene was made mainly in Moray, using native features and Luis Gomes' InsertCode plugin which allows to enter POV-Ray SDL code while in Moray workspace.
1stly I modeled the lighthouse after photographs found on the web.
walls, corner and windows stones are isosurfaces and CSG with isosurfaces.
The lightcage, optics and surroundings are CSG.
The stoned base is a conical isosurface with a displacement by an image I shot on a wall not far from my home. This image is mapped as pigment as well (with a gradient to black at the bottom)
The rusted handrail is made of prisms (posts) and spheres (rails) placed along a spline by 2 loops.
The man is a basic Poser character.
I modeled the gulls in Moray (bicubic_patchs and mesh)
The cloud is a simple transparent box containing a scattering media with a df3 density file generated by Gilles Tran's Makeckloud macro.
The sea (the timehog of this image) is an isosurface with a blend of unevenly scaled bozo pattern for the swell and f_ridged_mf function for the choppy waves. The foam is a texture from a function which fills a crackle more or less depending on the distance to the lighthouse base. Free water surface is fully transparent. Color comes from an interior with a redish absorption_color and scattering_color.

Render : POV-Ray 3.5 ;
Modeling : Moray 3.5 with Luis Gomes InsertCode plugin ;
Gilles Tran's Makecloud macro ;
Poser 3 ; PoseRay for conversion from .obj to Moray UDO ;
Kodak digital camera (stonewall map picture ) ;
Picture Publisher 8.0 : Bitmap editing (for the tower base map), detail pictures cropping, jpg conversion ;
Aprox 9 days render on a Sempron 2600+ 512 MB DDR

174_source.zip (8503 kb)

Great mood, nice try at a turbulent water, though not successful enough (where's the spray!!!!)