TITLE: MOHAN Lord Of The River
NAME: luisvaloyes
COUNTRY: Colombia
EMAIL: luisvaloyes@malditasea.zzn.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.luisvaloyes.uni.cc
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mohan01.jpg
ZIPFILE: mohan01.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    -EditPad
                       -POV-Ray
                       -Pbrush
                       -IrfanView
                       -Jans Formati 8

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 20 minutes 14 seconds ( 1 min. 40 sec. for parse, the rest
for trace )
                        

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6, 32 Mb RAM, running Windows 98


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The Mohan is a legendary creature, a kind of elf or something like that, who
lives in the Magdalena river, the most important river of Colombia. He is a
small man with long hair and a very long beard. This creature is supossed to
attack the fishmen, steal the fish, break the boats, and kidnapp the young
women who fall in love with him because he is a very good singer and guitar
player (... don't ask me, it's just a legend...). In this scene I try to show
the Mohan surounded by some of his women, somewhere in the Magdalena river.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This scene has been totally experimental for me, I did not use any modeling
software and I decided to "face my raytracing fears" about trees and human
figures. I also wanted to have a different image ratio and I got a cool
perspective with it ( at least I think so ). As the trees take a very long time
to render and they were not too important for the scene I finally decided to
use them only as backdrop objects. Everything in this scene has been created
specially for it, including all the textures. I also wanted to see what kind of
scene could I have using only low detail objects.

1. Modelling : As an experiment (for me), I decided to write all the code for
every single object using my favorite text editor, EditPad. 
I used only primitives and CSG to make all the objects in the scene. I tried to
create low-detailed, fast-rendering organic models, such as plants and human
figures, using only primitives and CSG, and I thik that I've got some good
models, although some of them wouldn't look very good in a closer shot. For the
human figures I made two sets of primitive-based body parts, one for the male
and one for the female, I also made the heads and the hair separately, then I
just rotated and translated everything to get the positions that I needed, (a
kind of "poor man's Poser", but it still needs lots and lots of work...), I
think they are pretty good to be my first human models... For the trees I also
made a set of leaves and branches and placed them together to create seven
different kinds of trees with only 396 leaves each one, so they are very
low-detailed but they give a good shadow...The same thing goes for the plants,
reeds, butterflies, skull-throne and stones... Maybe the best model in the
scene is the guitar, it even has strings although it is too far from the camera
to see them... The terrain is made of spheres and boxes too, and the water is
made with a couple of planes.

2. Textures : I used procedural textures for all the objects. The terrain and
the skulls have layered textures, and the water uses an agate normal and some
reflection. All the textures are quite simple, because nothing was going to be
close to the camera, so most of them need lots of work...

3. Scene : First I placed the main character, selected the camera angle and then
I placed everything else around that character, including the terrain. The
trees have been placed almost as colums, because I wanted the scene to look
like an interior scene although it is outdoors. The butterflies were used to
cover some poor details in the female models ( isn't it obvious? ). I used four
light sources, two of them are shadowless. I also made a new .ini file and used
the up and right values of the camera to get this image ratio.

4. Image : The image was rendered using POV-Ray as an 800x360 .bmp file with
anti-aliasing, the signature was edited and added using Pbrush and IrfanView,
and the final JPEG was generated by JansFormati8.

Notes:

1- Although the trees and the human figures are still "work in progress" I
included them in the .zip file, so you can play with them and try to improve
them. Please do not distribute the original files because they are not finished
(and because they are mine...), and if you use any object from this scene
please say where did you take it from, ok?.

2- The names of the objects in the .inc files are in spanish, some of them might
be used only in Colombia, and some are probably used only by me, so I put some
comments in english in the mohan01.pov file to let you know what each thing is,
but I have not  translated everything (and will not do it), I think you can
render each object to know what it is, or you can learn spanish, it's a very
beautiful and rich language spoken by millions and millions of people around
the world...

3- This scene requires "largas.ini" and the up <0,1,0> right <2.2222,0,0> values
in the camera statement in order to render good, the file is included in the
.zip file.