TITLE: Arena
NAME: Mischa Magyar
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: mischa@rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at
WEBPAGE: http://rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at/~mischa/
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mmarena.jpg
ZIPFILE: mmarena.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.02.watcom.win32 Pentium optimised

TOOLS USED: 

      sPatch v1.0 (Mike Clifton) (I love this tool)
      gforge v1.3 (John Beale)
      Lens Effects Plug-In (Chris Colefax)
      PovPeople Plug-In (Hero Ngauv)
      xtal4pov v2.0 (Klaus Kosten)
      blkmagic (Bob Franke)
      discwrld (Sonya Roberts)


RENDER TIME: 
    0d08h32m29s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 MHz, 96 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It is a warm mid-summer day. The sun is beating down and everyone on Alba
is in a good mood. Well, everyone except for one person perhaps.
Morsul, the servant of Orpan, was driven to the unwalkable lands exactly ten
years ago (not counting the two intercalary days ocurring every prime year).
To celebrate this festive day Atral, the ruler of Alba, had a brilliant idea:
Why not arrange a big parade with the strong army of Alba, with all their
dragons and soldiers, marching through the capital TiragWaares and throwing
sweets in the crowd.
That was a very impressive idea, the only problem was: sugar was not yet
invented.
So Atral decided to junk this plan and charged the local publicity department
with this task.

Besides the obligatory not much clothed girl on the advertisements shown all 
around the city, they suggested a big fight in the arena near TiragWaares. 
Their public survey showed that the fight has to involve a hydra with at 
least three heads.

And so everything was arranged for the great day. Many renowned warriors and
magicians were contacted, but only two of them recovered fast enough from
their concussions after fainting and hitting their heads when told about the
hydra.

So Gorin, the dwarven warrior, and Uropin, Magician of the Fourth Garn were
alone facing the in this moment still four-headed hydra.
The two unequal parties slowly circled each other, as mating easterrabbits
would do.
As the fight got more serious, Gorin had the glorious idea to ease the beast
of its heads, one after the other. But, as soon as Gorin has severed the
first head, in slashing at the neck with his battle-axe like a lunatic, two 
new heads grew, where only one had been before.

Meanwhile Uropin was more than hardworking. The first three minutes he thought
about which spell to cast. When he came to a result finally, he realised that
an icebolt would not be the best choice. The sun was too hot, so the icebolt
would melt before even reaching its target. Maybe the fireball can do better.
No sooner said than done. Hardly twenty minutes later Uropin gathered all the
mana his mind found dispersed over his body and concentrated it into a huge
fireball, aiming directly at the huge hydra...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The first thing I created was the hydra. I used sPatch to create five layers
(the body and heads, the eyes, the teeth, the tongues and the cut neck).
(The eyes were later replaced by spheres with an eyeball texture, looking
much better)
Then came the wall and the doorway. The snakes on both sides of the door
(in the final rendering you can only see one of them) where created with
sPatch (again) and (because I had problems when scaling the bicubic patches
too small) then rendered to a heightfield. The bars were created with two
loops.

To further use the PovPeople Plug-In I modified it, so that I can declare
different Suit and Pants textures.

Then I added Uropin, the magician. At first I placed his arms and feet (using
the mantest.pov coming with the plug-in) and then I adjusted the handposition
(using handtest.pov).
I have designed the mage's cape in sPatch (yes, again) and projected an
imagemap created with a paint tool by hand onto it.
After that I designed the magestaff with its flaring crystal (which is an
octahedron from xtal4pov's platon.inc and an additional lenseffect from Chris
Colefax' Lens Effects Plug-In).

I tried to create the fireball with winblobs, but that was not the right tool.
I then decided to do it manually with some halos and a lightsource within the
ball.

For the scattered skulls I used the skull2.inc from Bob Franke's last round
entry 'Five Skulls Ritual' (blkmagic).

To create Gorin, the dwarven knight, I began with the armor, which is designed
in sPatch (and again!). I wanted to do the whole knight in sPatch, but after
positioning and dressing a person from Hero Ngauv's PovPeople Plug-In with the
armor, I was very pleased with the result.
The battle-axe was completely done with CSG.
For the beard (a dwarf doesn't leave home without it ;-) I borrowed the
hair-procedure from Sonya Roberts' last round entry 'Follow That Luggage!'
(discwrld) and adapted it to fit my needs.

The terraces are also created using a while-loop.

The audience in the arena was very costly. I wrote two include files to
randomly distribute people (generated by the PovPeople Plug-In) with three
different postures (time was short), different clothing and different hair,
which was created with CSG.
(If anyone is interested, there are 129 people on the terraces.)

At last I added the cube with my initials, which I designed for my first entry
last round ('Magic Portal' (mmportal)).