EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net NAME: Robert Lee TOPIC: Decay COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Moria's decline COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV 3.5 TOOLS USED: IFranView, Little Gray Cells RENDER TIME: about 10 hrs HARDWARE USED: 2.4 Ghz Pentium on Windows 2000 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Moria in decay. "It looks like a tomb." "They have taken the bridge and second hall... We cannot get out. We can not get out. The end comes... drums, drums in the deep... They are coming" "There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The picture was rendered with +w1024 +h768. To reduce jaggies, +aa 0.3 was used. Most of the shapes are isosurfaces with a max gradient that is less than recommended to make the stone crack. Stone textures, combined with a stain texture and bumps are applied to the isosurfaces to create the rocks. I created dwarfish runes from "Fellowship of the Ring" and inlaid them into the stone along the top of the far wall. The inscription found on Balin's tomb are inscribed in the top of the tomb; but, when I lowered the camera angle for a more dramatic view, the inscription could no longer be seen. Elevate the camera angle and look down on the top of the tomb and rerender to see the inscription. The light beam was created by filling a hollow, invisible box with scattering media and then shining a light down from above through the media. I played around with different combinations lighting and radiosity before settling on the image presented here. In the end, the second radiosity setting, RadQuality = 2, was selected. The radiosity file was generated by setting the pretrace option to 0. The render was stopped when the final image began to be computed. The pretrace option was set to 1 and the final render was made. The scene is lit with 5 lights. A red light suggests that a Balrog is near. A strong light shines through the media box from above. An area light lights the back wall from the right of the camera. A second area light is left of the camera and lights the entrance way. An area spotlight shines down from above to light the floor, and a bit of the lower walls. A cobweb macro was written to connect semi- transparent cylinders to each other to fill a 3D space. Under certain lighting conditions, the cobwebs look acceptable. I created the scene with conditional switches so different parts of the scene could be rendered with simple or complex textures, simple or complex lighting, etc. This technique helped to speed up development. I left the conditional statements in the code so others can see how this is done. Code for the runes, pillars, and entrance way were stored in separate include files. There was no need to use high media samples, High_MSamples set to 0, because the image looked the same with or without the high sampling rate. IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.