TITLE: xcalibur

NAME: Juha Lepp_l_
COUNTRY: Finland

EMAIL: relepp@sci.fi
WEBPAGE: n/a

TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: xcalibur.jpg
ZIPFILE: xcalibur.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 
    Spatch to create the sword, HF-Lab and Paint Shop Pro to
make the heightfields, The brilliant Lensefcts.inc by:Chris Colefax
to do the sun, and Sonya Roberts new Tree-generator to do the trees.


RENDER TIME: 
    4 hours 52 mins and 40 secs


HARDWARE USED: 
    Cyrix Pentium 150 Mhz with 16 Mb memory


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    It's the legendary excalibur (the sword in the stone,
The sword of king Arthur , you know?!?!?!) relocated to a nice 
laky view.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I started out with the lake and
the sky, trying out nice textures for the lake.After trying several ripple,
dent and wave normals i was starting to be annoyed :)... I started trying
the bump normal and voila.The skyspheres base is from a example file by
Sonya Roberts, but i twinked it a LOT to get what i wanted.After a couple of
hours of test-rendering i started to create the work on the heigthfields.
First i made the one where the camera is located.I used ONLY Paint Shop
to make it :).After adding the shore to the image i thought it looked a
bit anemic, so i made another heigthfield.I started with HF-Lab and then
edited the result in Paint Shop.That hf became the (not that)far away island.
Then i started playing around with the new lenseffect include file
(by:Chris Colefax the genious)... First i wasn't shure what i wanted cause
i didn't know what the include file could do(btw it isn't included in the zip)
so i tested it until i got a sunlike effect from it (Oh man did it rock).
I used the new feature that allows the object to disappear behind
other objects cause i wanted a "realistic" sun.The next thing i did was
the trees. I went QUICKLY through the tree include files manual (it in HTML).
Then i created the trees (before them the image parsed in about 10-15 secs,
but after it took over 2 mins).
Then i started thinking about the REAL magic in this scene 
(not just the magically beatiful view),but i couldn't get anything
in my mind.I started searching for something from the internet and
i found a COOL program called Spatch.I started doing a dragon, but
it was WAY too complicated to be my first spatch model.I started 
searching for a tutorial of some sort.I went back to internet and found
a tutorial where one chapter was about modelling swords
(sorry but i can't remember the name of the author).Without the tutorial
i wouldn't have such a nice blade in my sword.That's just about it :).
BTW.PLEASE FORGIVE ME MY BAD ENGLISH!!!!!!