EMAIL: kingofmycastle@gmx.net
NAME: Florian Kastell
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The MystCastle
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://members.surfeu.de/tankproducts/thematrix/index.htm
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED:
LinkGen (which is a little POV-Ray Program to create chains, written by Tim Wenclawiak,
a good friend of mine), Photoshop 5.5 (to paint the heightfield)

RENDER TIME:
9 minutes 52 seconds
with these settings:
[1024x768, High]
Width=1024
Height=768
+AM2
+A0.3
+R5
+QR

HARDWARE USED: Athlon 550, 256 MB PC-100 SD-RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Since a long time I'm working on my castle. In the beginning my castle looked strange,
because I didn't have the knowledge to create acceptable textures and scenes
(you can see some earlier pictures on my website).

If you now look at my picture, you can see the work of many months, because behind
this picture, there is a complete castle with main-tower (I'm just working on it).
In order to stick to the rules of the IRTC I must explain, that thae main concept of the castle
was already finished last year (the towers, walls), but most time of the work on this picture
I've spent in the last two weeks. I've made new textures, objects, a new sky_sphere and
atmospheric effect.

Now that the Competition decided to have "fortress" as the next theme, I thought that
it could be a good chance to present my castle.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
In the picture you see the gate of a castle. The position of the camera is a worm's-eye view.
Therefore you get the impression of a big castle. And to make it more mystic I added two light
scources, one in the entrance and the other in greater distance to the castle. The last one is
an area light with fading.
The sky is made of a sky_sphere and a plane. The sky_sphere has a gradient from red to black.
A bozo texture with transparency simulates the clouds on the plane.
Fog and lightfading makes for an athmospherical touch.

Now to the castle: The towers and walls are simple CSG objects of cylinders, boxes and cones.
In the beginning I focused more on the modelling than on texturing but know they have become
more satisfactory. You can find them in the "castle_tex.inc".
The shields are CSG objects textured with checker and finished with metallic and phong.
The drawbridge is made with a few boxes and covered with a modified wood texture from the "wood.inc".
The levers are also covered with that texture. To create the chains I used a little program, made with
POV-Ray (program written by Tim Wenclawiak).