EMAIL: cph9fa@admiral.umsl.edu
NAME: Caleb Hines
TOPIC: Mythology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Gifthorse
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: none
RENDERER USED: Megapov 1.0
TOOLS USED: HamaPatch, MSPaint, Wilbur, Terragen
RENDER TIME: 7 minutes, 20 seconds
HARDWARE USED: 900 MHz Pentium III

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

There are two myths depicted in this image -- the ancient myth of the Trojan Horse, and the modern myth of Internet Security. The Trojan Army watches their commander as he investigates this strage new gift. The story is replayed conceptually as an antivirus software determines whether or not to accept the latest incoming files, or if they should be rejected as just another Trojan Horse.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my first submission to the IRTC. It took me a while to decide on a theme that fit the topic, but once I decided to do the Trojan Horse, I realized that I could use a pun to portray two seperate myths at once -- an ancient one and a modern one.

The titlebar across the top is taken from a screen capture, modified in M$ Paint, and rendered to the surface of a box. The window's frame is a standard wire frame box. The clouds are a marble texture, with some roation, stretching, and turbulence, and applied to a transparent plane in front of the skysphere. The ground is made of two seperate heightfields created/edited with Wilbur and/or Terragen. The rocks are rotated superellipsoids with some bumps, and each grass blade is the intersection of two toruses. The horse is mostly a mesh for which I entered the individual vertex coordinates by hand after studying several online images. The horse's base is made of a box and several cylinders. Finaly, the soldiers utilize an include file I've been working on to do simple humanoids in CSG. They are made up completely of cones and spheres with the exception of the helmet, which was partially modelled in HammaPatch. I used Paint again to convert the final bmp to jpeg.

My original intention was to put ropes around the horse's legs and a group of sodiers pulling on them. Unfortunately, after I had the ropes in place, I realized it would take me too long to pose each soldier individually. Unfortunately, my CSG humanoid file is not very good at poses yet. So I opted instead to write a simple for-loop to position the vigilant Trojan Army. This loop greatly slowed down the parsing and rendering time of the entire image.