TITLE: Nightfall NAME: Steve Reeves COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: dormammu@erols.com WEBPAGE: personal page http://www.erols.com/dormammu TOPIC: Night COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: nightfal.jpg ZIPFILE: nightfal.zip RENDERER USED: POV Ray 3.0 for DOS TOOLS USED: I used several Moray for DOS, the Lens Effect & Galaxy INC files by Chris Colefax, Height Field Lab by John Beale and a Text Editor RENDER TIME: About 1 hour, 50 minutes in a DOS Shell from Windows 3.1 HARDWARE USED: 486/66DX2 with 16 megs of memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a night scene.. you can see the lamp posts leading your way to the observatory, and a beautiful night sky scene. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was by far the most complex image I've ever created.. and, it isn't all that complex when compared to past IRTC Winning Images. Anyway, I started out one day thinking, "I should make another entry for IRTC .. my moonsrr image was pretty weak" .. so, I decided to depict a scene from Isaac Asimov's famous story "Nightfall" .. it would be near the end, when the populace of the planet, driven insane by lack of light, sets everything they can find on fire in a desperate attempt to produce light. Then I hit a snag. I can't ray trace people OR flames. I messed around with Lens Glares and such, but didn't have any luck in making anything that even remotely resembled a fire. So, I gave up on that, but kept the name as "Nightfall" for my picture. So, I started clean and went to the trusty Height Field Lab generator by John Beale and produced some terrain. I loaded this up in Moray and scaled it properly, then I made a simple observatory consisting of a sphere (as the dome) and a superellipsoid as the base. Then I realized the lighting really stank. So, I created a new file and carefully modelled a Lamp Post. The Post itself consists of 2 Toruses, 4 cylinders, and two sweeps. (Somehow, POV Ray calculates that to be a total off 500 or so objects -- don't ask me.) So, this took be about an hour to model properly. (Don't laugh at me over that, please.) Then I copied the object into my main Nightfall scene, and quickly made 6 lamp posts, which created a horribly large amount of light, so I killed 2 of the posts and was much happier with my results... then I pulled out Chris Colefax' Lens Effect and Galaxy INC files, and coded in a Lens Glare effect for the two front most lamps, and tossed in a random galaxy sky sphere. I like both these INC files quite a bit, and will be likely makingmore pictures with them in the future. Then I decided to finish work on the observatory. I resized the sphere a bit until it looked good on top the base. (btw, the Sphere was originally supposed to be a "stand in" for a dome created via the Geodome utility, but I decided to go with a plain sphere last second.) And then I made the telescope, which is merely a few cylinders of decreasing radius put on top of each other. The lamp post is a big CSG object, and I was going to make the observatory a CSG object, but decided against it. For the height field, I tossed together a texture which was suppose to look like dirt, but doesn't even come close... I think it's cooler looking anyway.