EMAIL: duncang@eclipse.co.uk NAME: Duncan Gray TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Intruders at the gates (of paradise) COUNTRY: Great Britain WEBPAGE: www.eclipse.co.uk/duncang RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g (.watcome.win32) TOOLS USED: None (bit of a purest like that ...) Image-Ready to convert output to JPG CREATION TIME: Approx 2-3 weeks part time. RENDER TIME: 9 hrs 40 mins @800x600 aa+.3 HARDWARE USED: PII 450, 256Meg Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The native fishermen have returned, and as the sun sets on this island paradise, the sea returns to find the warning signs. Intruders at the gates (of paradise) DESCRIPTION OF WHY THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first go in the STILLS comp, though I have entered the ANIM comp a few times. I was working on an entry for the 'Slow-Motion' round of the ANIM competition, it was nothing particularly special, I was entirely re-using old characters and scenes, but it became clear about 2 weeks before the ANIM round closed that I wasn't going to get it finished on time. I decided to cut my losses, and to try and vindicate myself by getting an entry into the STILLS comp instead. Hope you like it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I wanted a smooth transition between the walls and turrets of the castle and the surface of the beach, blobs seemed the logical way to do it. The beach and the castle are therefore a single blob object. The 238,432 component sphere's are positioned using a range of macro's developed for this scene, they include macro's to create the components of walls, turrets, arrow-slits, and the surface of the beach itself. Once I had these macro's working, the beach and castle came together pretty quickly. The palm tree is made of a trunk and crest - the trunk is pretty straight-forward, a union of cones and toruses to create a stack of plant-pot type shapes. A bumpy normal is applied for a little roughness - though this is not particularly apparent in the final picture. The crests of the palms are built in a similar manner to the leaves of the plants. A single leaf is declared for each layer and repeated in a circle for each layer of the crest. Three trees are built then repeated to create the forrest. This used up all my 256Meg of Ram. So I had to have a re-think. The solution was instead of building each leaf out of 80 bi-cubic patches (the individual 'tassels' on the trees) the leaves are build of two bi-cubic patches, textured in a striped green/transparent texture combined with a spine to the leaf made up of cylinders. The change in appearance was minimal, but it drastically reduced the memory needed. Next up was some foliage - the large and small plants are built in the same way - Each leaf is made up of two bi-cubic patches, an array is created to store the declaration of each leaf, one leaf is stored for each layer, then the plant created by repeating a single leaf in a circular pattern for each layer of the plant. This saves unnecessary creation of leaf objects, as by this time, I was already getting tight for memory. The plants are positioned by the macro which generates the beach. Each time a blob component is laid, the altitude of the point is evaluated. As the height rises, the probability of a small plant appearing increses. At about 4.5 units, big plants start appearing and again become more probable as the altitude increases. This gave a nice 'natural' look to the plant placement, so I didn't bother tweaking it any further. The crab is built from blobs. Two macros's build the bulk of it - one creates blob components that follows a cubic spline, the other a bi-cubic patch. Both permit the colour of the component to be programmed via a spline, and one also permits the blob component to be scaled based on a spline. From here, construction of the crab was just a matter of fiddling with the spline control points passed into the macros until it looked right. The boat is two blobs and a bunch of cylinders. The macro's used for the crab came in handy to produce the hollowed out log and outrigger. The water was built like the beach - blob components described by bi-cubic patch parameters. The blob is merged with a plane so it stretches to the horizon. There is a hut in the woods somewhere - it's another blob, components are arrange using a macro again. The hut roof is a bunch of cylinders. And that's about it. Oh, a word of warning: most of the macro's have a jitter parameter which varies the placement of the blob components - this is what provides the uneven surface, which in turn meant I didn't have to do too much work on the normals in the scene - the normal for the beach is a tiny granite pattern, to produce the grainy effect. The undulations in the surface _are_ undulations, not a normal. Blob components are evaluated using a routine which estimates whether the component is in the field of view of the camera, the component is aborted if it is out of view. This saves shed-loads of memory, but does mean that if the camera is moved, or rotated, the beach will change shape and the trees will jump around ! This will require the crab and the hut to be re-positioned by eye. (i.e. so the crab isn't buried in the sand, and the hut doesn't have a tree growing through the roof). To move the camera during scene construction, it is necessary to move the camera directly, not using the cam_pos and cam_tgt parameters. N.B. Don't try and render it unless you have about 150Meg of free memory. There are some declares in the top of the .POV file which switch off or optimise parts of the scene. They are used to speed rendering time, but setting the palm_cutoff variable to a very small number will loose all the tree's. This drastically cuts the memory usage and should allow 128Meg machines to render the scene.