EMAIL: macdonald@lonhelyg.freeserve.co.uk
NAME: Julian MacDonald
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Knight Fight
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 beta
TOOLS USED: Moray v3.3, PaintShop Pro, Hamapatch
RENDER TIME:   1 hour
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Many centuries ago was a better age; an age of nobility, honour and chivalry where men fought battles fair and square (well, that's the impression one gets - how true it is I don't know!).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
As usual I used Moray to build the scene and rendered with various versions of Pov-Ray finally settling on PovRay 3.5 beta.  I wanted to add a motion blur to the silver knight's sword/arms so I started with Megapov but the scene just took too long to render for my patience to allow it to finish.
Virtually all of the modelling was done using the excellent Hamapatch,  i.e. the knights and their weapons and shields and the foreground tree and rocks.  The landscape is built from 4 heightfields, 3 at various distances from the camera and one 'rock' layer which peeps out above one of the other heighfields.  I played around with a texture map material for th closest heighfield to try and get a patchy muddy look.  Heightfields were made from hand-drawn bitmaps created in Paintshop Pro.  Trees were done with Gilles Trans tree macro (Moray plugin via Keith Hull).  I initially had one of these for the foreground tree too but was unhappy with the unrealistic look of the tree in close-up.
For those interested, I have put the Hamapatch knight models in the zip file.