EMAIL: mick@mhazelgrove.fsnet.co.uk
NAME: Mick Hazelgrove
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Lord of the Hunt
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: www.mhazelgrove.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm
RENDERER USED: Started in Megapov finished in Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Poser, CorelPaint, Photoshop, UVmapper, Hamapatch, spiralizer, Plant Studio
RENDER TIME: 10 hours approx
HARDWARE USED: 800mhz Athalon 256mb Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The 'lord of the hunt myth' featuring the Wild Hunt, the Herlathing, and the Lord, called Garanhir, the Hunter(Thanks for reminding me Andy - I shall re read Alan Garner's books). He is calling the Hunt to ride. The doe watches her mates deparure whilst her fawn feeds unconcerndly. The eagles are just plain nosey! The owl who normally resides on his shoulder, has been abruptly woken by the cry of the horn and somewhat startled has perched on the menhir. He is now sulking with his back to his lord. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

	This image has occupied my brain almost full time for 6 weeks now (thank goodness I'm on holiday). It began as a vague idea about barrows and not much else, most of my work starts this way, I rarely have a clear idea of what I'm going to do before I start. The Lord of the hunt grew out of the landscape. 

	I started in Megapov but, with the permission of the Povray team, finished in pov 3.5, mainly to test some new features that will replace eval pigment. Just in case you think this gave me an unfair advantage, the whole image, with very few changes could just as easily be done in MegaPov.

	First I tried to create a HF but I couldn't get it to work so I tried Isosurfaces but couldn't control them, in desperation I created a mound HF in Photoshop and hand placed it on an isosurface. It worked, next I added the grass created with my own much modified grass macro(thanks Bob and Tor). To keep the grass count down I tried to remove the grass from the hidden sides of the mound and with the help Of Margus Ramst, eventually suceeded to partialy make it work. In the process I rendered the mixture of Isosurface and HF code with an orthographic camera to create one single HF. This was imported in Photoshop and the trench for the path was added. I then added a new layer and created a white copy of the path before deleting the background to give me a new image map I could use along with an eval pigment style technique to place the rocks on the path. I used a similar technique to place the menhirs.

The water gave me more trouble than anything else but on a couple of recent walks in the hills I was delighted to see water that looked just like mine. It really is time that the real world stopped copying raytracers!

	The main figure is a Poser model with additions created in Hamapatch. The figure texture is much abused but doesn't show up well because of both the scale and of low radiosity settings. The shield texture is an image map from a scanned celtic motif, textured in photoshop to give it a wood texture and then given a more 3d look with layer effects. The horn was created in Spiralizer. The owl is a hamapatch model, UV mapped and hand painted by me, unfortunately I can't get the eyes to stand out. I did consider adding pov primatives or media glows but I just don't have the time. The Doe and Fawn were downloaded from the net and posed in Poser. The flowers stated as Plant Studio models but as these are huge I removed everything but the petals to save memory.


Not all the files are incuded in the Zip File to try and keep the size down but I am more than happy to supply them on request; there are nearly 200Mb of them.

Finally I want to thank all, who made comments regarding my WIPs on 
news.povray.org.


Mick Hazelgrove