TITLE: R.I.P. 20th Century NAME: Richard Morton COUNTRY: England EMAIL: richard_morton@hotmail.com TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: 20c_rip.jpg ZIPFILE: 20c_rip.zip RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.1 TOOLS USED: trial v1 and error v1.21 RENDER TIME: 1h 50m HARDWARE USED: Pentium II-350 128Mb IMAGE DESCRIPTION: During the 20th Century more people have been killed as a result of war than in the rest of history put together (approx. 160 Million and still counting). The image portrays what to me is one of the most negative aspects of the history of the 20th Century. It was partly inspired by a Junior School Trip to France in the early 70s when we studied the D-Day landings (as well as improving French language and learning about the culture). As well as seeing some of the landing beaches and museums we visited a war cemetery and I was struck by the scale and the orderliness of the graves. It seemed a very peaceful place in stark contrast to the reasons for its' existence. Anyone who has been to such a place cannot fail to be moved. It is not meant to be a realistic representation, more symbolic (which is my feeble excuse for not including other objects e.g. buildings, walls, trees, sky, Tom Hanks). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first entry to the IRTC. The Grass was made by creating a TGA from a Jade textured plane (source jademap.pov in the zip file rendered at 160*120 no AA) and then using the tga as a bump map. By experimenting I found that I needed to add some turbulence to avoid the edges of the original TGA being visible and distracting the eye. The cross shape was generated from primitives mainly by trial and error (I really should invest in a pencil and some paper). The curved corners to the stones were a bit of an afterthought from when I looked at my original slides from the trip (taken on my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic).The texture was taken from the excellent supplied stones textures and slightly modified. The embossed text was somewhat fiddly to position and only really looks OK on the foreground cross (and adds significantly to the render time). Although the war cemeteries are very well ordered there is inevitably some variance in positioning of the stones. I included a random element to the translates to allow for this (without it the image is too uniform). I know that using a plane for the grass was an easy option and makes the whole image a little flat, so I would welcome comments on how to make a a gentle landscape and translate objects to sit on the landscape at the appropriate height.