EMAIL: williamb@thirdroad.com
NAME: Bill Bruedigam
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Winter at Raven's Keep
COUNTRY: US
RENDERER USED: Bryce 5
TOOLS USED: Corel PhotoPaint 9, Bryce 5
RENDER TIME: 28:54
HARDWARE USED: 900 MHz Athlon, 768 meg ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The gray and cold of Winter has engulfed the world, and even the ravens have left this place.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Crumbling walls: are heightfields created in PhotoPaint as square blocks of different levels of gray.  I then copied each heightfield , and without moving it made it smaller, then just a bit taller than the original to get the ice on top of the walls.  The ice heightfields were heavily "eroded" to keep them from just being a flat block laying on top of the wall.  

The trees: Bryce trees with so many tweaks I wouldn't know where to start.  I tend to lean towards more gravity, of course no leaves, tweaks on all sizing and angles; from branch start angles to quantity to size, and of course textures with more bump than the ones that come with the trees.

The gate: simple, just a collection of cylinders, torus and cones.  The texture is a rust texture with the colors altered and the bump increased for more realism.  Again, the textures that come with the program fall well short of realism, but the built in editor makes it very easy to create new, more "real world" textures.

The snow drifts; simple heightfields.

I spent most of my finishing time on the sky and the atmosphere, trying not to get too dark, but to have a Winter gray feel to the air.  A light fog reaching into the edges of the scene, but not overwhelming it to the point of being markable.  Haze was pointless since the walls block the view of the horizon.

I was very careful to not let the tree limbs penetrate and of the objects they were close to.  Not the gate, the tree limbs nicely fall to either one side or the other.  That close up, the live going into the gate would have totally blown the whole feel of the place.

All of the textures are variants of Bryce textures using the built in texture editor.  I tend to lean more towards increased bump heights, more refraction, and some color variations to create more realistic textures than those that come with the program that seem almost plastic.

There was no post processing other than conversion to jpg (and of course jpg compression of 3% to get below the 250k size limit).