TITLE: Grave Fortress
NAME: Leroy Whetstone
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lrwii@joplin.com
TOPIC: fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fortres.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Povray 3.1g Dos (ran under Win3.1)


TOOLS USED: 

    jpeg covertion: Lview by Leonardov Haddad Loureiro
    POV editor: (unname) by me & PFE (Programer's File Editor) by Alan Phillips
    
    pov include files: Trees.inc by Sonya Roberts 1997 
                     : Make Grass marco by Gilles Tran 1999   


RENDER TIME: 

    Trees: 1hr. 0 min. 45 sec
    Final image: 53 min. 3 sec.
    


HARDWARE USED: 

   Amd K6 500Mhz 128 Meg RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


 The ultimate fortress the Graveyard. You know people are dying to get in there!

    Decidcated to Issac Asimov. One of the best Sci-Fi writers.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  This is the Sixth contest I've entered. I started to make a castel on a 
 height field. When I had the basic lay out, I realized that just hate castels.
 Well not hate, but I didn't want to spend 200 hours or more working on 
 another one. I'd made one for my web page. Any way I rethought my project. The
 last line in the subject's discription is 'Any place that is hard to get into 
 or out of'. That's when the old joke about Graveyards came to me.
 (You know people are dying to get in there!) Graveyards are Hard to get into 
 and once your truly in, you NEVER get out. 
  Once I started I wanted to put real names on the headstones. But who? 
 I had just reread  'Asmiov the early years' a while back and found out 
 that he had died in 1992.(much to my surprize, to me he'll live forever!)    
  
SCENE:   
      I wanted to have it look as if your looking into the graveyard from
without.
     When I put the pickets in front of the camera they took away from the 
     scene rather than add to it. So I let the shadows do the job.(hopefully)
     
      I use antialiasing method 2 threshold .5 depth 2 jitter 1

Objects:         

 lights: I use 2 lights one is White, tight array 4*4 one unit square.
         the other light is Gray60, used to make the grass in the shadows show
up. 
 
 headstones: are simple CGS with 4 different layered texures, each stone's
texure
             is translated differently so each stone is diffrent 
             the letters are 'crytal.tff'from POV, place by hand   
   Issac Asimov headstone is centered  on the first row. The headstones on 
either 
  side of his is that of John Campbell and John's pen name.( for those who
don't
  know John was Issac's 'mentor' and the editor that help get him started)  
    The second row contains 3 great men from history and 3 charaters from the
first
  story in that book.
    The third row contains all 7 people of the Challenger distater in 1986.
They
  can barely be seen.
    The rest of the rows can't be read so they are all Asimov. 

 Grass:  I use MAKE GRASS macro made by Gilles Tran to make 2 different grass
meshes.
         They where placed using a loop and random to turn each.
  flowers: simple CGS place ramdonly except for some in the front place by hand
    weeds: simple CGS place ramdonly except for some in the front place by hand
 
 Trees: I use TREES.INC pov made by Sonya Roberts to make the trees 
        I tried to use that program from the main program but I ran out of
memory.
        (The first time since my up grade. I found out that I'm only using half
of my
        expaned memory). So any way, I made an image map with the trees 
        and put in on a polygon scaled and translated it into place.
 
 Sky: I use a sky sphere that came with POV with a redish filtered plane 

 Hills: You may not be able to tell but there are 3 hills (the trees hide most
of
         them) I use hill maker(made by me) to make a triangle mesh. Then
rotated
         scaled and translated then textured them. The closet one blends with 
         the trees.
 Fence: are simple GCS for the base, pillers and pickets.
       heads: made from 3 lathes scaled differently to make the face
              the eyes are spheres place in cutouts    
 Shadows:  the pickets shadows show up well again the stones but not to well
against 
          the grass. 
          There is a hard to see shadow of a man standing right behind the
camera.          
          And a shadow of a tree in the lower right corner.  
 Burried head: is the same head as on the pillers rotated so the eyes don't
show.
               I put it in as an after thought. It needed something.   

Epilgue:
  The theme is a little morbib. But I prefer to look on the light side. If
anyone is 
 offended by my using real people on the headstones, I apologize. 
 
  I'm sorry that I didn't include a zip file. But I find the more complicated
the
 scene gets the more I scatter secondary files(like image maps,meshes,and so
on...).
 
  Feel free to E-mail me with any comments and or suggests.