EMAIL: rowens@fvcc.cc.mt.us NAME: Rick Owens TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: "Master's Match" IMAGE FILE NAME: romagic1.[png|jpg|gif] COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://mail.fvcc.cc.mt.us/~rowens/ RENDERER USED: Povray 3.00 for MS-DOS TOOLS USED: Freemacs (text editor), dmake, Jih-Shin Ho's Display (conversion to jpeg), gforge (height map for sand floor) RENDER TIME: 4 hours 35 minutes 30.0 seconds (16530 seconds) HARDWARE USED: 486DX4/100, 8MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two master-level mages are engaged in a bout to show students some of the techniques and tactics involved in a mage duel. While not quite a no-limits brawl, the mages are not pulling their magical 'punches'; therefore, both the contestants are heavily shielded. Too, the students who would normally be seated on the stone steps are instead watching the match through spy-eyes, small metal and crystal spheres designed to augment the power of clairaudience and clairvoyance spells. Losing a spy-eye can cause a painful backlash, but that's minor compared to being directly scorched by a wild energy blast! Already deflected strikes have left fires and other things in the sands of the practice ground. At the moment, one master has thrown three bursts of ball lightning, and the other is countering with a whip of magefire. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Edit, render, repeat until more or less satisfied. I started with a basic idea of how it would go together (2 mages in magical combat in a simple arena), typed in some primitives, then did a test render. From there I added other elements as seemed appropriate. (Actually, I'm not completely satisfied with the image, but the deadline is looming, so....) In case anyone's curious, I built this image while listening to Rush ("Prime Mover" from _Hold Your Fire_ is particularly apt for raytracing, IMHO), Capercaille, Yes, Enya, _Granuaile_ (comp. Shaun Davey, singer Rita Connolly) and Anuna.