EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
NAME: Peter Murray
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Attack on the mountain castle
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
COUNTRY: England
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1b4 Macintosh PPC
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 LE (heightfields, imagemaps,
converting to JPEG, adding credits)
GraphicConverter 2.5 (converting heightfields and imagemaps to PNG)
DeskDraw 3.0.7 (for working out layouts)
RENDER TIME: 
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop
DISCLAIMER: No castles were razed or otherwise harmed in this rendering
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A castle on a mountain top
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I had a different idea, initially a street scene from a fantasy setting
I've been working on, but then focussing on a few shops.  I finished the
buildings I needed, but the nonhuman figures I was trying to include (no
humans in the scene) were just far too ambitious to get done in time).
See http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/wip.html for some of the unfinished
objects I'd been working on.

It occurred to me I should have gone with a simpler scene, of a castle
on a mountaintop.  I'd hoped to have a flying creature overhead, but
I was still working on the original image until February 27th, and the
flying creature, based on a creature from the original image, was still
too ambitious to finish before the deadline.

The foreground mountain was created in Photoshop just by drawing a dark
area in the centre of a lighter area, then smudging the dark area out into
the lighter area, and finally adding Gaussian noise.  The resulting
greyscale image was used as the heightfield, and also enlarged and coloured
to make the imagemap used to paint the mountain.

The background mountains were done similarly, except that all three of
them were drawn on one heightfield (and they're distant enough that I
didn't enlarge the map before colouring it).

The top of the mountain was levelled by use of mighty spells, or maybe
by differencing it with a box{}.  Then a castle sketched out in Deskdraw
was built as a CSG object and positioned on the levelled-off mountaintop.

The camera position is meant to represent the view of a group of attackers,
preparing to climb the rest of the way up and attack the castle.  They're
(a) hiding and (b) behind the camera, so you can't see them.

(Besides, if I could have got the attackers done, they'd have gone
shopping, as I said above!)

The PNG files have been included in the zip file, which may have been a
mistake!  Oops.  (This paragraph was added to the .txt file while waiting
for the zip file to ftp :-) .)