TITLE: Les derniers jours de Pompei NAME: Jerome BERGER COUNTRY: France EMAIL: bergerj@iname.com WEBPAGE: http://www.enst.fr/~jberger TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: jbpompei.jpg ZIPFILE: jbpompei.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for linux v 3.1 TOOLS USED: Arabeske, Giles Tran's tree include, gcc, the Gimp, XEmacs RENDER TIME: parse 39s, render 11h 31m 36s HARDWARE USED: P-II 333MHz, 64Mo RAM, Linux IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Pompei's last days", everybody has run off and the town is left to ash clouds and distant lava flows. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I first made the road (with somebody's wall macro, he didn't put his name in the file and I didn't note it so I can't give the credit where it's due, sorry), and a simple cone for the volcano (the scale is right btw), then I fought a long time to get the medias right (part of the problem was due to C++Builder which didn't compile my code correctly and got corrected when I switched to linux and gcc...). I then added the tree (with Gilles Tran's fantastic macro), the grass patch (an adaptation from a macro submitted by somebody during the long thread on grass in povray.binaries.images) and the plazza (a box with a texture done with Arabeske, the fountains are simple CSGs of a couple of toruses, cylinders and a lathe). Then I made the temple by simple CSG, the lightning made it appear flat, so I added the two torches. It is to be noted that the doors were really modelled: the square are actual indentations and not a texturing trick. I modelled a house, then put copies in three places with different angles of view. It is mostly a CSG of boxes, except the roof for which individual tiles where modelled with cylinders (you can actually see it on the top roof of the house on the right back). I had to uses manual bounding boxes there, even though they generetated a lot of warnings (my guess is 88 a house but I didn't check exactly) because they speeded up the render considerably (in general, I think that whenever you have a regular union of a lot of objects, such as tiles on a roof or bricks on a wall, and if it doesn't take up much room in the final image, then you'd better put bounded_by statements and to hell with pov's warnings). Finally, I made the lava flow as a csg of cylinders and spheres. Unfortunately, it was so slow to render (even with a bounding box) that I had to comment it out and replace it by a texture on the volcano cone. If anybody has got the time (and computing power) to render the pic with it (and with media_interaction on for the sun) I'd be interested in seeing the result... Notes: - it would certainly look better with people running for their lives or just staring in awe, but I don't have Poser and I didn't have the time to model them directly in Pov or with sPatch. That's all folks!!!