TITLE: Star Temple Ruins
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sfruins2.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray for Windows 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Pov-Ray for Windows 3.1; Paint Shop Pro 6.0 (signature and image
conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    Approx. 2 hr 30 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 266; 64 mg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 A star-shaped temple partially destroyed by the ravages of time.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

 Since the temple is the focal point of the image, I started by using boxes and
cylinders to lay out the basic shape of it.  Then I went back and
"deteriorated" it.  The worn effect on the columns, their bases, and the steps
are achieved by basic texturing.  The walls are constructed of individual
bricks, with the end bricks intersected with prisms to give a rough, broken
look.  Prisms were also used to cut away parts of the top trim, in conjunction
with texturing.

 The altar is rather basic, using a dull metal texture along with an overlaid
texture to give it a somewhat corroded look.  The vases were created using a
lathe object - breaking pieces out of them was harder than I expected - I had
to cut a slightly smaller but taller lathe object out first, and then cut
prisms out to get rid of the missing parts.

As for the scenery, the cliffs are a simple heightfield created within Pov-Ray. 
The reddish wall started as a rectangular prism, and I defined the top edge
with almost one hundred points to give it the rough look. (Didn't turn out as
well as I'd hoped, though.)  For the plants I intersected prisms with a
hollowed-out sphere for the leaves, applied a gradient pigment, and rotated
them around the center.  (I'm not sure they look real, but I think they're
kinda cool.) I used the same plant object for the trees, simply changing the
texture and adding a basic trunk.  For the flagstones I created a basic box
with rounded corners, and then intersected it with several prisms to created a
few broken pieces, then joined those together to create the whole object.  The
rocks are all the same blob object, scaled and rotated differently so they
don't all look the same.  Since the birds are too far distant to see detail, I
simply took my leaf object from the plant to create the wings, added a simple
two-component blob for the torso, and applied a different texture.  Lastly, I
took some pieces of the temple and placed them around the base of the temple to
heighten the "falling-
down" look.

As a first-time entrant to the competition, I am very interested in receiving
constructive criticism and comments via e-mail.  Please feel free to take a
moment and let me know your thoughts.  Also, I have not posted my source code
mainly because I am a very sloppy coder... my source code is a complete mess
usually.  But if you are interested, I would be happy to e-mail anyone a copy
upon request.