EMAIL:warwick@troll.no NAME:Warwick Allison TOPIC:Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE:Dragon Rider COUNTRY:Norway RENDERER USED:Povray 3.0 TOOLS USED: hacky fractal program, C++ hacks, gimp, ctdws, hf-lab, ppm tools, xsurface RENDER TIME:2 hours HARDWARE USED:Pentium Pro 200 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A thousand-year-old Elven Wizard has captured a Red Dragon, using his magical mind-controlling staff. Of all the denizens of the fantastic lands of swords and sorcery, wizards have always appealed to me in contrast to knights and their ilk - I'm more impressed by the exploits of a frail old man in toga than some oaf in a tonne of armour with a 9-foot-long sword. So this is how I imagine a wizard using magic rather than might to not just defeat a vicious dragon, but also to take it as a possession. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The dragon body is blobs, with connect-the-dots for the neck, tail, horns, and wings. The scales are a bump map. A useful `plugin' for creating ellipsoids between arbitrary points in included (used to scallop the skin of the wing). The foreground mountain is a 16-bit heightfield, generated by a quick-hack fractal program, then edited with an image editor to get the snow texture. The cave is a blob subtracted from the mountain. The background mountains are created with HFLab, coloured by an image map, with fog to give distance. The wizard is a modification of NB's wonderful "female body" objects featured in the Physics&Maths round. My modifications were to extend the hip joint to a allow splaying, masculinizing, many changes to the facial features (longer nose; more eye control & detail - see source for features; ears; higher brow), the new clothes and sandals, and the ancient skin texture. The blue cape and wrap were designed with xsurface (a simple bezier editor). The staff halo is, unsurprisingly, a halo, while the emanations from it are just-barely-visible tori.