EMAIL: youknow@ucan.foad.org NAME: Tina S. TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT TITLE: XVI: The Tower COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7 (Windows) TOOLS USED: IfranView (conversion to JPG) More coffee than you want to think about RENDER TIME: Between 9-10 hours (exact time not noted) HARDWARE USED: Pentium 400MHz/128M RAM (development) Athlon 1.2Ghz/256 RAM (final render) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Revolution. Cataclysm. Disruption. Calamity. Disaster. Transformation. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Yes, this is long. For those of you who hate long files, here's a quick summary version: Tower: isosurface blocks with noise, with some CSG applied to make windows and broken side. Flames: Blobs w/media, overlapped. Clouds: A big hollow sphere, which also clips the Water (and the surface under the water): boxes Moon: Textured sphere (corona is with a sky_sphere pattern) Rock (under tower): isosurface (box + big noise) with slope pattern Card face: Boxes + text object Three light sources (one for flames, one for moon, one to illuminate the card face with a high fade so it wouldn't hit other scene objects). Radiosity. Hence the reason I borrowed a friend's machine to do the final render. This is the first time I've regretted the 250k size limit -- or, I suppose more importantly, the requirement for JPG. There's a bit of color banding in the clouds and on the rock that is a JPG artifact. ...[Long version begins] I had originally been thinking doing a broken-down castle, and was sketching the tower when this idea came to me. The question of what exactly it should look like took very little time; I had a clear image in my head from the start. Getting there, on the other hand, was not necessarily as easy. After some experimentation with some various isosurface objects (and some helpful technical advice from the friendly denizens of the povray newsgroups), I managed to come up with a number of worn bricks (which given the night-time scene may have been overkill; the details of the wear aren't very visible) that I liked. With a bit of searching, I found out how to make said bricks circle correctly (for a time, I thought I might have to resort to square bricks since the rotation was what was stumping me), and with a bit more experimentation figured out how to layer them so they were not in vertical lines. A bit of CSG, and I had a tower with windows. Then I spent about five million years working on flames. Or maybe it just seemed that way. I started out with cones and patterns, and then one day, when discussing the results with a friend, she suggested organic shapes. Hence: blobs. There are three basic shapes, all blob-composed, used in various rotation and scale. Media seems to interact slightly oddly with blobs; the same density map that worked well with a cone produces somewhat paler flames than I would like. Still, I think this is the best choice, something to play with later. There's a light source in the center of the flames. With most of what I needed already reasonably worked out, I put together the basic scene (sans "card"): the tower (hanging in mid-air; I knew I was going to put something under it, but wasn't sure what yet), water (and an underwater surface), a sky sphere. The result was not quite what I was after, which led to a few changes. The first one was replacing the cloud-bearing sky_sphere with a plain sky-colored one, and adding a very large (and thick) hollow sphere to which the clouds were applied... and then adding a moon. I'd always planned on it being a moonlit scene, but it wasn't til this point that I realized the moon really ought to be -visible-. To go along with this, I changed my water (and the bed of the sea) to boxes cut off by the inner aspect of the cloud sphere. This worked much better with the textures chosen. I mulled over a few choices for what the tower support should look like, and ultimately decided on a mossy, crumbling rock to go with the wear on the tower. ...and speaking of wear on the tower, it occurred to me that what was missing was visible damage to the tower. Add a bit more CSG. Now spend a week and a half tweaking things (mostly textures) and add the card face (a little tricky to get it to line up right). Then work swallowed my life. Ultimately, I'm fairly satisfied with the image, but I think I might have done a few more things with more time: 1) I'm still not sure I shouldn't have had the clouds on a flat plane as well as in the sphere. I probably would've had to tweak the moon to do this right, however; the moon-cloud interaction is on the low side at the moment, something else I might hvae played with more. 2) There's no smoke. I would've added it. 3) The flames are still a bit too transparent at the edges; they only take on real volume where superimposed on other flames. Likewise, while the color is reasonable, it's a bit -too- regular, I think. I suspect part of the solution here would've been more complex blobs, and it's entirely possible adding a bit of pigment to the blob itself would help. 4) I thought about putting sills of some sort on the windows, or outlining them with bricks, but I'm not sure that's really necessary. I would've liked the time to try it, though. 5) I think I would've liked to make the waves less regular, but never got the time to further tweak that, either. I'm still not sure the sea stretching out into the distance is the best option, but that one was deliberate, rather than lack of time. I had considered adding some other rocks and maybe a distant land at the horizon, but I kind of like the vast, empty sea feel, too.