EMAIL: Emory_Stagmer@amecom.com NAME: Emory Stagmer TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Armor COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.access.digex.net/~justgus/ezekiel/ersbio.html RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01 Windows NT TOOLS USED: PhotoShop, LParser, SPatch RENDER TIME: about 10 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, back in the year 935 AD, three knights found the most magical item. A flameless torch, shining the most intense light ever seen. What was it? How did it get there? "Any sufficiently advanced tecnhology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke I know I'm not going to be the only one to use this theme, but since it's one of my favorite quotes, I'm using it anyhow. I think this image works well on two levels. From the perspective of the knights in the image, the flashlight is "magic". From OUR perspective how did it get there? We don't know of any technology making that possible, so we can also say it's "magic". DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: There are alot of folks to thank for the stuff in here. Nothing's blatently copied, but several elements or ideas are used and I want to be sure to acknowledge them all. First, Denis Olivier: Merci beacoup! Your idea for the two dimensional trees in a night scene was just what I already had in mind and the idea saved hundreds of rendering hours! Second, Derek Owens: Nice trees and plants which you have made available to the raytracing public. I really will try to drop a shareware 'thanks' in the mail. I wanted to put some plants on the ground, but ran out of time (don't we all?!) Third, to whoever it was that suggested the idea for a finish{ambient 6} on a starfield to account for anti-aliasing: Take a look! It's GREAT! Fourth, Laurens Lapre for the trees distributed with LParser. They're great! The trees are the biggest thing I want to talk about here. Three were from LParser distribution archive (Tree04, Tree10, Tree11) and the other was from a distribution by Derek Owens. I output them to a POV file, and set all the colors to black, white background, no lights or other objects, and rendered them. In Photoshop I converted them to a B/W 2 color GIF (white background, palette #0). The black was actually just a little grey so I could change their ambient light in the final render and make it so you could distinguish individual trees. Then I used them as an image map onto a thin box. I scaled the boxes by a random amount, altered their height by a random amount (making the trunks shorter essentially), gave them a random amount of ambient light, moved them by a random amount away from the camera, and rotated them a random amount around the camera. Yes there is actually a woods all around the camera and central scene. I wanted to make sure that any light or reflections off the armor looked right. These woods will look find for any camera rotation, but if you get too far from the origin you will notice that they are really just two dimensional. BUT they render about 100 times as fast! AND in a night scene like this they really are two dimensional anyway. That would be true from a great distance also, but then you may have to have more than just one grey color (one from DO has some green in it. It's a 6 color GIF). The torches have 7 light sources, one in the center and 6 around the perimeter of the flame. I probably should have used an area light, it would have rendered faster in the long run and looked the same as the 6. The guy in the center has a CSG torso and helmet (I really liked this helmet, but my dust halo for the flashlight really obscures it in the final image...oh well no time to re-render!). All the other armor was created in SPatch. Hands were created in WinBlobs. They don't look much like real hands, but the make really good leather gloves! The guy on the left has my face! The picture is from my badge at work! I scanned it and took out the glasses in Photoshop, then placed it on a cylinder inside the helmet. The only thing is I part my hair on the other side...must be a rotation thing... The guy on the left also ended up with a dis-embodied hand. It's that outtatime thing...it's 1:45 AM here in the eastern US and so I've got 1:15 before the deadline (midnight Pacific time) and I'm bailing on any more tweaks. Hope you like this! Emory R. Stagmer Bass/12string/keyboards for Ezekiel's Wheel http://www.access.digex.net/~justgus/ezekiel Programmer, woodworker, and occasional Raytracer!