TITLE: Dragon Rider
NAME: Warwick Allison
COUNTRY: Norway
EMAIL: warwick@troll.no
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dragonri.jpg
ZIPFILE: dragonri.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    hacky fractal program, C++ hacks, gimp, ctdws, hf-lab, ppm tools,
xsurface

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A thousand-year-old Elven Wizard has captured a Red Dragon, using his
magical mind-controlling staff.

Of all the denizens of the fantastic lands of swords and sorcery, wizards
have always appealed to me in contrast to knights and their ilk - I'm
more impressed by the exploits of a frail old man in toga than some oaf
in a tonne of armour with a 9-foot-long sword.  So this is how I
imagine a wizard using magic rather than might to not just defeat a
vicious dragon, but also to take it as a possession.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The dragon body is blobs, with connect-the-dots for the neck, tail, horns,
and wings.  The scales are a bump map.  A useful `plugin' for creating
ellipsoids between arbitrary points in included (used to scallop the skin
of the wing).

The foreground mountain is a 16-bit heightfield, generated by a quick-hack
fractal program, then edited with an image editor to get the snow texture.
The cave is a blob subtracted from the mountain.

The background mountains are created with HFLab, coloured by an image map,
with fog to give distance.

The wizard is a modification of NB's wonderful "female body" objects
featured in the Physics&Maths round.  My modifications were to extend
the hip joint to a allow splaying, masculinizing, many changes to the
facial features (longer nose; more eye control & detail - see source
for features; ears; higher brow), the new clothes and sandals, and the
ancient skin texture.  The blue cape and wrap were designed with
xsurface (a simple bezier editor).  The staff halo is, unsurprisingly,
a halo, while the emanations from it are just-barely-visible tori.