TITLE: The city is open for business
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
    http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/wip.html for work-in-progress pages
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC - yay!
TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.
REFERENCES:
    Summerhays' Encyclopaedia for Horsemen, by R.S. Summerhays and
        Valerie Russell, Threshold Books 1988 ISBN 0 86436 191 2
RENDER TIME: 
    Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes   3.0 seconds (3 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    0 hours 13 minutes   8.0 seconds (788 seconds)
    Total Time:    0 hours 13 minutes  11.0 seconds (791 seconds)
HARDWARE USED:                           
    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The city's gates are open for traffic to enter and leave - now.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The basic idea occurred to me almost straight away, and I sketched out
the massive town gate building for the role-playing setting city that I'm
trying to build as the linking theme for my year 2001 entries, and put that
across the main road into the city.

Then I started to model some smaller objects which I'd need for the image
as I visualised it.

Two versions of a cart were relatively straightforward to model, and both
are in the scene, though they're not very prominent in it.

A horse to draw the cart was more of a problem.  I modelled a simplified
skeleton from a library book (see References) and then started to try to
add flesh to it, mostly using blobs.  I've since thought of a better way
to try to do this, but it'll take a long time to sort out the basic
code.  The horse model as used in this scene isn't usable in closeup,
which is why the three horses in this scene aren't shown from the side.

The human being model I've been working on for some rounds now looks like
a reasonable skeleton... but the result of adding flesh to the horse
showed me I'm not yet ready to model a human that way!  So I haven't even
used the older version of the humans which were in the previous round.

A hanging cage with one of the figures from the Worship round was modelled
quite quickly and easily.  That was fun to do.  However, the cage's structure
relied on a transparent texture, and I had to delete it from this scene
when even a 320x240 test render hadn't completed by 11pm!

So... I managed some of what I was trying to do in this entry, but I'm
generally disappointed in how much of it I managed to finish.

On the other hand, I may have found a house to buy in the real world :-) !