TITLE: Druid Temple
NAME: Nigel Denton-Howes
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: ndhowes@mail.skybus.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.3dillusion.com/~ndhowes/
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dtemple.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Imagine Version 1.3.4

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    7 minutes 59 seconds.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166mhz
                96 MB of RAM
                Matrox Millennium w/ 8 MB WRAM
                A few pounds of gray matter.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I attempted to capture the old notion of the druids around the time that
King Arthur was supposed to be strolling about the earth.  The druids tended
to stay in places such as these for their mystical ceremonies and strange
activities, sometimes illegal of course.  Almost always they had an object
of worship so I created the gem to fulfill this.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I'll go through this step-by-step.  Unfortunately if you don't use Imagine
for your raytracing, you may not understand everything.  But heck.

People may find it interesting that the only image maps in this picture were
the engravings which were used as height maps.  All other textures are
procedural
textures included with the Imagine program or coded by its users and
distributed
free of charge. 

Onto how this was made...

The walls are primitive planes which I deformed using magnetism.  They have one
layer of the Colour Noise texture (for the horizontal 'layers') one layer of
Fractal
Bump (for that rocky feel) one layer of Worm Vein (for the white veins in the
rock,
to simulate veins of quartz sometimes found in rocks) on layer of ABDust (A
texture
designed by Alan Bucior! Thanks Alan! to make the upper-facing rocks dusty) one
layer of Dirt to get rid of that plastic feeling associated with computer
generated
images (it does a fairly good job, not perfect though. Oh well.)  After this
three
images were applied as Bump Maps to make them look like they were engraved in
the stone.

The floor and pool were made almost exactly the same way.  The only difference
being 
that the pool started off as a primitive sphere and was sliced by a plane which
was used
as the ground.  The same textures, minus the imagemaps and ABDust, were used. 
In place
of ABDust the mountaintop texture was used to create the dusty feel.

The water in the pool is a primitive disk.  It is fairly transparent and has a
bit
of transparency and refraction applied.  Only two textures went into its
making,
the Ripple texture (for the slight ripples on the surface) and the Drip Drop
texture, for
the ripples expanding outward from the pillar in the center of the pool.

The light beam is a primitive tube which has been made a bright fog object.  I
applied
the Nebula texture to give it that random fog thickness, like slightly more dust
in one
part of the air over another.  It's also a shadow casting lightsource.

The light glows are primitive spheres which have been made fog objects.  The
falloff on
the objects was set to radial, overdrive was set to 2.3 and the fireball texture
was
applied to make it translate from yellow to orange-red.  They are all shadow
casting
light sources with i/rr (real world) falloff and varied intensities to produce
funky
shadows.

The arch in the foreground is a simple mockup thing made of a primitive tube
with several
sections that had been rotated around to give the shape I wanted. The same
textures that
are on the walls were applied.

To end, I'd like to thank a few people for their great suggestions for this
pic..
Rich Maurice <-- Undying constructive criticism!
Tom Delany <-- Great suggestions for those stones!
Brian Jones
Mike Bayona
Martin Lykke
Virt (What's your real name, virt?)
Anders Gulowsen
and many others from the #imagine IRC channel and the Imagine Mailing List.