TITLE: The Summoning NAME: Ian Bosley COUNTRY: New Zealand EMAIL: Ian.Bosley@trimble.co.nz TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: ihbsumn.jpg ZIPFILE: ihbsumn.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: sPatch 1.0, wCvt2Pov 2.6b, HF-Lab 0.84 RENDER TIME: 38 hours 3 minutes 48 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium-90, 64Mb RAM, Windows NT 4.0 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: His hands are bathed in eldritch fire. Sweat beads his brow. The distant sounds of his brother monks drifts down the stairs, singing in adoration of a God he has forsaken. Soon the power will be his. He has planned this moment for a long time -- reading old forbidden tomes, gathering the materials, finding the disused cellar, choosing the right moment. His brow creases in concentration. Even now, the smoke from the fire pit is swirling in strange patterns, coalescing in a form. An immense form. His throat is dry as he murmurs the words of power. As the demonic figure grows more distinct, he nervously glances at his pentagram of protection. He can only hope he has remembered everything. The alternative is unthinkable... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image began with an afternoon of playing around with Mike Clifton's very wonderful bicubic patch modeller, sPatch. I had an idea I could use it to model draped cloth. That afternoon became an evening, and then the next morning, and I had a wizard, with arms raised in a gesture of conjuration. It was downhill from there. The fire is a heightfield, image created with HF-Lab. The flames are a box-halo, linear mapping in y-axis. The book is made up of bicubic patch pages. The image maps used for the text are pages from the Celtic Book of Kells, downloaded from the Internet at http://www.exotique.com/fringe/art/symbolic/BookKell/kells.htm The flying scraps of paper are made from bicubic patches, too. Man, I love that sPatch! Here is a list of my plagiarism and perfidy. * I filled in the wizards face by taking the ubiquitous Beethoven DXF model, stripping off his hair and clothing, and scaling to adjust the proportions to those of the cowl. * The hands are also a 3DS model, flipped to make both left and right. Both these models were downloaded from Avalon (ftp://avalon.viewpoint.com/avalon/). * The demon is another 3D model, this one from 3D Cafe, (http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/default.asp) called hero1 -- originally it was a 3DS model, by Robert Grant (robert@proact.co.uk). A very impressive model which was created from spheres (according to the accompanying text file). * I feel bad about the candles, but I was pressed for time. I borrowed the include file from the truly excellent winning entry in the IRTC "School" competition, "A Scholler's Tools" (Image by Jeff Lee http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk). Thanks, Jeff. Your entry was inspirational. * The banner hanging on the wall is an astrological calendar -- an image gleaned from too much websurfing researching the occult. Everything else was created by hand, and everything was positioned by hand, using the POV-Ray for Windows built-in editor. The long render time is because 1) that hero model is huge and 2) the only machine I have access to that can handle POV is my work machine. So during the day I had to run POV at normal priority or lower. Additional thanks go to Peter Grooby, my artistic conscience, who prodded me into adding most of the groovy things when I felt like being lazy. Ian Bosley Christchurch, New Zealand.