EMAIL: tom@tomandlu.co.uk
NAME:  Tom Melly
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Lucy's Arrival 
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: http://www.tomandlu.co.uk/
RENDERER USED: POV 3.5.beta (Win95/2000)
TOOLS USED: Poser3 (for figure), 3DWin (for figure conversion), UVMapper (for UVMap extraction), PSP7 (for UVMap colouring and HF and contrast adjustment), Leveller 1.3 (for HF)
RENDER TIME: 1.75 days approx. 
HARDWARE USED: I'll have to check...

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The scene depicts an incident from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - one of a series of allegorical novels by C.S.Lewis.

Lucy arrives in Narnia, an oppressed but magical land locked in perpetual winter, through the back of a wardrobe on Earth.

As well as the world within worlds plot of the books, the image is a reference to the writers, the makers of these worlds, who create such places in their heads. In addition, rendering itself is yet another variant on the theme...

There are 5 factual errors that directly contradict the book afaik - try and spot them all...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The bulk of the landscape is an MRF iso-surface, but the near-detail is a HF, partially modelled in PSP and partially in Leveller 1.3, and using an overhead orthographic template of the scene to help position the elements of the HF.

The lamp-post is courtesy of a Gilles Tran include. The version I use has a slightly modified lighting arrangement, so I've included the modified version with the submission. You can obtain the original at Gilles' must-visit site (http://www.oyonale.com/).

The wardrobe is entirely CSG, but a trace-based macro is used to position the snow on it's top (the same macro is used for the lamp-post). The mirror uses photonsfor the reflections on the snow. It's probably not noticable, but I've used Rune's fur-texture on some rather hopeless furs (http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk).

Lucy is modelled in Poser 3 (actually she's a bloke - well, boy), and then converted with 3dWin, UVMapper and PSP. Due to the low-light, I've settled for very low detail on the image-maps and textures. I haven't included the required mesh, so you should make sure that Do_Lucy is set to false if you want to render the scene. Alternatively, you will find the mesh available from my website, at http://www.tomandlu.co.uk/raytracing

There are some stars, and a blue-black gradient on the sky, but I don't know if it's really visible.

There are 15000 trees in the scene. There are 5 tree-varients, constructed by a macro from meshes (foliage) and simple cones and cylinders (trunk and branches). These trees, within sensible constraints, are then rotated, scaled, tilted and positioned at random. The middle-distance and far trees use simplified versions (omitting first the branches and then the trunk as well, but leaving the meshes).

IIRC, snow by moonlight seems bluer in the shadows than in the light (I think - we haven't had any decent snow in London for years), and to get this effect, the snow has a blue tinge, the moonlight has a red/green tinge, and a fill-light at the camera location has a neutral tinge.

Despite the normal dissatifactions, I'm quite pleased with it on the whole, and I'd like to thank everyone on the pov-newsgroup for their advice and help. I don't think I received a bad suggestion, and if I'd had time I would have loved to have incorporated more of them.

BTW if you find the image a little dark, a non-adjusted, lighter-contrast version is available at http://www.tomandlu.co.uk/raytracing/