TITLE: The Great Fire of London NAME: Karl Manning COUNTRY: England EMAIL: karl@pemail.net WEBPAGE: http://www.gfxgallery.com TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: fire.jpg RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.02.watcom.win32 TOOLS USED: SPatch 1.5 PaintShop Pro 4.14 Poser 1 Amapi Studio 3.06 Crossroads RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: 233MHz PII 64 MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In 1666 the Great Fire of London started in a bakers shop in Pudding Lane. The fire was the biggest single calamity in the history of the city. It had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 6 chapels, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul's Cathedral, the Guildhall, the Bridewell and other City prisons,the Session House, four bridges across the Thames and Fleet rivers and three city gates. Surprisingly, only 3 people died in the blaze. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: A rough layout was made with square blocks for the buildings, standard poser figures for the people and a light in a sphere for the fire. This made an abstract picture which in some ways I prefer. Anyway, the buildings were detailed using csg and boxes. I thought I'd do the same with the people. Bah. I tried exporting the figures from Poser as a DXF file, then importing them into Amapi to draw some clothes on them. Poser 1 doesn't like the DXF format. There were big holes in the image, in particular the heads got completely mashed. I spent a lot of time trying to convert across with little success. I then thought I'd use a mesh from 3D cafe (http://www.3dcafe.com). Got some faces, now we just have the problem of scale - poser file is about 1 unit high, the 3d meshes are approx 100000 units wide. Amapi doesn't let you scale things too small, although it will read in meshes with fractional points. In the end I gave up, and created the whole of the figures using spatch. To reduce parsing times, I exported from spatch as a DXF instead of as a pov file (which uses bi-cubics). This was then taken into Amapi and exported from there as a POV file. The advantage of doing this instead of using crossroads is that Amapi uses smooth triangles which makes the image look a lot better. Karl Manning karl@pemail.net