EMAIL: earlec@rocketmail.com NAME: Colin Earle TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Donnatar Castle COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: N/A RENDERER USED: povray 3.0g for windows TOOLS USED: PhotoImpact SE for the heightfield RENDER TIME: 13mins HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A re-construction of a castle ruins I once visited on the East Scottish coast. The landscape is lush green grass with very few trees. The castle itself sits on top of a squarish island carved from the surrounding coast surrounded with cliffs. A small land bridge connects the castle to the mainland. Cold, wet and windy. Not my ideal sea-side holiday house. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The first thing was to create the height field to use as the landscape. I'm sure there are better ways to create a landscape, but this is my first image and after many hours of experimenting, I left it as is. Next step was to construct the castle itself. All bricks are superellipsoids with the exception of the front gate arch and corner towers. For the front arch I used cylinders and for the corner towers, a linear spline. At this stage I discovered how to use the povray language a little better and hence, the building to the front left took much less time to construct using while loops. I attempted to use a 'difference' to cut the windows out, however, this increased the rendering times by an unacceptable amount of time, so I just removed some bricks. Originally, the bricks in the castle presented nice little uniform patterns from a distance. To remove this effect, I rotated the original brick around the three different axis to give the walls a slightly more random look and remove the patterns. The trees in the background come from a very nice tree generator macro, complements of Sonya Roberts (sonya_roberts@geocities.com) and accompanying tutorial. Sky and water are slight modifications from tutorial links from the POVRAY web site.