EMAIL: EDavis@VermontCountryStore.com
NAME: Elroy S. Davis
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE: A Child's View
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: www.lynn.ci-n.com/~esdavis
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows, V. 3.1g
TOOLS USED: Moray for Windows, V. 3.3
            Photoshop, V. 5.0 (for PNG to JPG conversion)
RENDER TIME: 28 minutes, 35 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 200 MMX, 32 MB
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An army of plastic soldiers stands ready to defend the wooden-block castle of a child's imagination.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I began with the vague idea of building a castle of blocks.  I started the project by modeling a single wooden block in Moray.  I used a standard wood texture that is included with Moray for the "white" color of the block.  I then began playing with the colorization of that texture to create the various colors used on the blocks.  After the first block was created, and the colors were satisfactory, I duplicated the block several times and began "stacking" them in a manner similar to what a child would do to create a castle.  I quickly realized that I would need other block shapes to make a proper castle.  I added the arches and pillars, again using the standard wood texture from Moray.  I began "stacking" again, and came up with the final castle pictured.  
The next part of the castle was the drawbridge.  For some reason, I remembered using things like popsickle sticks and pencils to build things with when I was a child.  I grabbed a pencil from my desk and modeled that in Moray.  As an inside fortress joke, the pencils are modeled after the ones manufactured by Dixon-Ticonderoga (Fort Ticonderoga lies on the Vermont/New York border).  All of the colors and textures on the pencils were "hand-mixed" in Moray.

Next, I had to decide what to do with the castle itself.  The idea of tin soldiers came to mind.  After several unsuccessful attempts at modeling tin soldiers, I gave up and began work on the cannon.  The cannon is made up of a sphere, and various sizes of cones and cylinders.  Again, the colors were done from scratch within Moray.  After the cannon was finished, I added the marble "cannon balls" to help add to the toy effect.

I then had to decide what else to had.  I started working on a soldier again, this time basing the design on a nutcracker.  I decided I'd put a single soldier in the archway of the "gatehouse".

Although I'm still not entirely happy with the resulting soldier, I decided to replicate him, in a smaller form, for the troops in the foreground.  I added the cutlasses at the last minute to help destinguish them from the "general".  The soldiers were created, again, from simple shapes and hand mixed colors.