TITLE: The Holy Grail
NAME: Anders Aver_
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: dvinc@oden.se
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: thegrail.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray v3.0 for Windows; Paint Shop Pro v.5.00

RENDER TIME: 
    14 hours 49 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-120, 32 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I spent some time thinking on elements in general without any inspiration
showing. Since English 
isn't my native language I finally resorted to an English-Swedish dictionary. It
told me, among other 
things, that the bread and whine in the Holy Communion are referred to as The
Elements. With this 
knowledge, my mind begun to work in a creative manner again. As a result of my
intention to attain a 
somewhat mystical atmosphere, I also adapted my image to the theme through the
"Four Elements" as 
well as to the elements referring to whether and wind.


To explain my thoughts I will tell you a perfectly true ;-) story:

For some years ago, I and some friends of my childhood went on a journey we had
dreamt about for 
ages. The idea was to travel in the crusaders footsteps and, as we used to joke
about, perhaps find the 
Holy Grail. According to the myth, this is the cup from which Jesus shared whine
with his disciples  
during his last supper.

When our little adventure only had at few days left we arrived to a small but
strange village in the 
northern of Italy. Here, we had been told, a monastery where situated on the top
of a small mountain. 
The inhabitants treated us as something they had never seen before. Especially,
they where showing 
an odd interest in our cameras and the radio we brought to communicate with the
civilization. Almost 
as if they had never seen such things before. They also wore  strange clothing
and every one of them 
spoke a very good English, even if the vocabulary had an ancient touch

From the first day, when we arrived to the village, it was obvious that the
people there disliked the 
idea that we should go up to the monastery. They told us that it was inhabited
by the undead...

I think I_ll better break here. Before you all get to frightened  ;-)

However, finally we came up to the top of the mountain and inside the monastery 
we had of course a 
good  fight with some medieval knights, which were child_s play for us great
Scandinavians ;-) Just 
inside the door to the great hall of ceremonies we then faced a recently dug
hole in the floor and in a 
pile of dirt we could all gaze at the beautiful Holy Grail a short moment before
we heard rattling of 
armour and everything went dark...

...How we managed to get away from this godforsaken place is, however, a totally
different story.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All of the modelling are done in Moray except for the jewels. These are manually
edited RAW-files
The textures on the walls and the cup are bump maps which I have drawn in PSP.
The lightning and 
the torch handle are made by means of image maps, also done in PSP. I spent some
time to get the 
golden Cup to look right. My intention where that it should have a somewhat
forged appearance.

This is my first 3D "scene" ever built and since Moray and Povray are quite new
to me there has been 
a lot of experimenting with the tools before I came to a reasonably good result.
As I said, all of the 
modeling have been done in Moray and this is fine for now, but I think that if I
want to put all my 
creativity into the work I must get familiar with the Povray script language.

Thanks for reading,
/Anders