EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Star Temple Ruins
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: n/a
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray for Windows 3.1
TOOLS USED: Pov-Ray for Windows 3.1; Paint Shop Pro 6.0 (signature and image conversion)
RENDER TIME: Approx. 2 hr 30 min
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 266; 64 mg RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
 A star-shaped temple partially destroyed by the ravages of time.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
 Since the temple is the focal point of the image, I started by using boxes and cylinders to lay out the basic shape of it.  Then I went back and "deteriorated" it.  The worn effect on the columns, their bases, and the steps are achieved by basic texturing.  The walls are constructed of individual bricks, with the end bricks intersected with prisms to give a rough, broken look.  Prisms were also used to cut away parts of the top trim, in conjunction with texturing.

 The altar is rather basic, using a dull metal texture along with an overlaid texture to give it a somewhat corroded look.  The vases were created using a lathe object - breaking pieces out of them was harder than I expected - I had to cut a slightly smaller but taller lathe object out first, and then cut prisms out to get rid of the missing parts.

As for the scenery, the cliffs are a simple heightfield created within Pov-Ray.  The reddish wall started as a rectangular prism, and I defined the top edge with almost one hundred points to give it the rough look. (Didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, though.)  For the plants I intersected prisms with a hollowed-out sphere for the leaves, applied a gradient pigment, and rotated them around the center.  (I'm not sure they look real, but I think they're kinda cool.) I used the same plant object for the trees, simply changing the texture and adding a basic trunk.  For the flagstones I created a basic box with rounded corners, and then intersected it with several prisms to created a few broken pieces, then joined those together to create the whole object.  The rocks are all the same blob object, scaled and rotated differently so they don't all look the same.  Since the birds are too far distant to see detail, I simply took my leaf object from the plant to create the wings, added a simple two-component blob for the torso, and applied a different texture.  Lastly, I took some pieces of the temple and placed them around the base of the temple to heighten the "falling-
down" look.

As a first-time entrant to the competition, I am very interested in receiving constructive criticism and comments via e-mail.  Please feel free to take a moment and let me know your thoughts.  Also, I have not posted my source code mainly because I am a very sloppy coder... my source code is a complete mess usually.  But if you are interested, I would be happy to e-mail anyone a copy upon request.