TITLE: Attack on the mountain castle NAME: Peter Murray COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pdmcstl.jpg ZIPFILE: pdmcstl.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1b4 Macintosh PPC RENDER TIME: 1 hours 15 minutes 8.0 seconds (4508 seconds) TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 LE (heightfields, imagemaps, converting to JPEG, adding credits) GraphicConverter 2.5 (converting heightfields and imagemaps to PNG) DeskDraw 3.0.7 (for working out layouts) RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop DISCLAIMER: No castles were razed or otherwise harmed in this rendering IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A castle on a mountain top DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I had a different idea, initially a street scene from a fantasy setting I've been working on, but then focussing on a few shops. I finished the buildings I needed, but the nonhuman figures I was trying to include (no humans in the scene) were just far too ambitious to get done in time). See http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/wip.html for some of the unfinished objects I'd been working on. It occurred to me I should have gone with a simpler scene, of a castle on a mountaintop. I'd hoped to have a flying creature overhead, but I was still working on the original image until February 27th, and the flying creature, based on a creature from the original image, was still too ambitious to finish before the deadline. The foreground mountain was created in Photoshop just by drawing a dark area in the centre of a lighter area, then smudging the dark area out into the lighter area, and finally adding Gaussian noise. The resulting greyscale image was used as the heightfield, and also enlarged and coloured to make the imagemap used to paint the mountain. The background mountains were done similarly, except that all three of them were drawn on one heightfield (and they're distant enough that I didn't enlarge the map before colouring it). The top of the mountain was levelled by use of mighty spells, or maybe by differencing it with a box{}. Then a castle sketched out in Deskdraw was built as a CSG object and positioned on the levelled-off mountaintop. The camera position is meant to represent the view of a group of attackers, preparing to climb the rest of the way up and attack the castle. They're (a) hiding and (b) behind the camera, so you can't see them. (Besides, if I could have got the attackers done, they'd have gone shopping, as I said above!) The PNG files have been included in the zip file, which may have been a mistake! Oops. (This paragraph was added to the .txt file while waiting for the zip file to ftp :-) .)