....and so castles made of sand melt into the sea, eventually... -J. Hendrix I was listening to this particular song when I found out what this month's competition topic was, and so you can see where my inspiration came from. I tossed about a few other ideas, like a gingerbread house or maybe a bridge of popsicle sticks, but the sand castle idea stuck in my head. Here's the stuff yo uneed to know.. Files : sandcasl.jpg - 800X600X24bit .JPG rendering of my idea sanscasl.pov - The source code for the above image sandcasl.txt - The file you are currently reading Author: Bill Durbin - durbin@wpi.edu Programs utilized : Eric Jorgensen's Terrain Maker v 1.1 and POV 2.2 This image took 4 hours, 52 minutes, and 9 seconds to render on my 486DX2/66mhz. Here's what's in it... The Sand Castle, the sand around the castle, and the cliffs in the background are all heightfields I designed in Terrain Maker. I probably could have squeaked by with only two height fields, but I wasnt thinking straight when I made the castle, so I failed to include the beach with it. The Beach Ball is a simple CSG object comprised of four boxes and a cylinder, all cut to look like a sphere. The Plastic Shovel is my pride and joy of the scene. I spent a lot of time getting it to look just right.. it's also is a CSG object.. only a little bit more complex. This could be one for the ol' object archive people are trying to set up over the newsgroup. The Popsicle Sticks are just boxes with cylinders slapped on the ends, and then a wood texture I modified along with some different colored stains to make them more realistic. The moat/ocean is just one big plane lying underneath the whole thing, and it shows up wherever the sand is not present. I also felt that the picture needed to look like a sunset was about to happen.. dont ask why, I just did, so I lowered the light source a ways and made it orange. I think it added dramatically to the overall effect of the image. Well, that about wraps it up. This is my first image I have contributed to the competition.. I have been raytracing for about a year now, on and off, and this one was made possible by the fact that I had a lot of time on my hands recently :-) Hope you all enjoy it! - Bill Durbin (durbin@wpi.edu) check out my web page for three other images I have done with POV.... they are all pretty lame, but I like them nonetheless :-)... it can be found at : http://www.wpi.edu/~durbin/raytrace.html