EMAIL: ffrog@geocities.com
NAME: Sean O'Malley
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: acrypt1
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/~ffrog
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray, Paint Shop Pro (BMP->JPG), LParser, others...
RENDER TIME: 6:54:43
HARDWARE USED: Cyrix 300 Mhz / 48 megs RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The dead of night; full, bright moonlight from a clear sky streams
through the old, long-empty stained glass windows.  The crypt, decrepit
and adorned with statuary long cracked and eroded by time, sits quietly.
But something's lurking in the doorway...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is, to me at least, a good example of how to use height fields
and media to best effect.  Almost *no* normals were used in this
entire scene; I found them too unrealistic for my purposes since in
some situations it's easy to see that any "normalised" rock is still 
perfectly flat and the bumpiness is an illusion.  One of my favorite
shapes in this scene is the Irish gravestone in the foreground, made
by rendering a solid-colored 2-D version of the same shape on a
solid-colored background in POV-Ray, importing it into Paint Shop Pro,
and adding noise to it for the surface.  (Yes, it could've been drawn
by hand, but it's hard with a mouse!)  Adding noise in PSP was how I 
made most of the height field surfaces, including the really spiffy 
roof and the quasi-realistic time-eroded statues on the front of the 
roof of the crypt.  Other objects:

1) The whole crypt is CSG.
2) The eyes are lathe objects filled with an emission medium.  I put
   a red light slightly in front to add a glow around the doorway,
   but made sure that it died off fast enough that it didn't illuminate
   the whole scene.
3) The rose windows are made with a cool L-System I wrote for the purpose.
   It is unbelievably easy making these kinds of things with L-Systems!
4) The whole scene is filled with a medium.  It sure sucked up the processing
   time but the light covers such a large area it wouldn't be practical to
   make enclosing media-filled shapes.