TITLE: The More Things Change
NAME: John Campbell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jcampbel@lynn.ci-n.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.ci-n.com/~jcampbel/
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: war_jbc.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g (Linux/x86)

TOOLS USED: 
    joe text editor, home-rolled terrain generator, GIMP image editor

RENDER TIME: 
    4h 45m 34.0s

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K7-650 / 512M

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The technology changes; the reality doesn't. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All models in the scene are hand-coded POV. The terrain heightfield and the
hole taken out of the building came from a home-made terrain generator
(http://www.ci-n.com/software/terrain/) that I'd actually written for
another project and tweaked a bit so that it would produce heightfield
imagemaps suitable for POV. The insignia and namepatches mapped onto the
battlearmor (which are all but invisible at this range) were done in GIMP,
as was the final conversion from PNG to JPEG.

The battlearmor I made using a primitive human figure (crude and ugly, but
accurately proportioned) I did ages ago as a guide - literally layered the
armor sections over the figure, making sure everything was covered with no
bits sticking out, and that the joints were all in the right places. The
armor sections are all independent CSG objects, and the transforms that link
them into the full suit have macro variables embedded in them to make
manipulating the pose fairly trivial. Then I copied the base suit out into
seven different POV files (one of which was unused) so that I could
customize the weapons loadout, pose, scaling, and other details (like the
aforementioned undetectable namepatches) of each suit, posed them, and
placed them in the scene.

The hardest bit for me to model was actually the road. I really wanted to do
a dirt road, but I couldn't figure out a way to lay a reasonable-looking one
over the surface of the heightfield without doing a lot of time-consuming
surveying to figure out exactly where that surface *was*, and I was feeling
deadline pressure by that time. The best I could do ended up looking like a
brown carpet rolled out over the ground, so I switched over to a paved road,
which could get away with much less blending into the surrounding terrain.

The fighters and missile I'd already modelled for a different project...
they fitted well here, so I used them. Useless trivia: The fighters are made
primarily of polygons, and contain the only polygons in the scene.
Everything else is made of solid primitives.

The AA gun is straightforward CSG modelling, nothing terribly complicated,
though I'm rather pleased by the way the tires came out... which is another
detail that's not particularly visible in the final render.

The building is also fairly straightforward CSG... the roof, however, gave
me fits. The original roof was made out of some 20,000 individual shingle
objects, rotated and translated in a loop, then trimmed to fit.
Unfortunately, this broke POV's automatic bounding. Even with manual
bounding, the render would slow to a crawl when it hit the roof's bounding
boxes. After the first full-detail render of the roof kicked the render time
for the building up from two minutes to ten hours, I made a simplified
version of it using plain boxes to save time on the test renders and didn't
turn it back on until what I intended to be the final render, a week before
the end of the round. When the render was still running five days later, it
became apparent that it wasn't going to finish in time, so I killed it and
switched back to using the flat panels, with a normal pattern to emulate the
shingles. The normal pattern is somewhat visible on the end roof, but on the
main roof it's all but wiped out by the lighting.

The hole in the corner of the building is a heightfield generated by the
same program I used to make the terrain and chopped out of the building with
a CSG difference.

The fireball on the horizon and the various plasma bolts are emission
media-filled spheres (stretched, in the case of the plasma bolts) with point
lights in their centers.