TITLE: Night Pyramids
NAME: Grant Wier
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: PsycoDeadMan@innocent.com
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nightpyr.jpg
ZIPFILE: nightpyr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    vim

RENDER TIME: 
    5 hours 45 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2/350


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I got the idea for a night time scene of ancient giza moments before i got to
the irtc web psyte. I looked and one stills competition had just ended and
the new topic was, ironicly, Landmarks... So i thought hey cool, i guess i'll
start on that now.
I've seen other pyramid submissions, for example in the History topic,
before...
but most of them were pretty simplistic day scenes without much detail and
bad texturing... so my goal was to do a really NICE scene.
In the end there's several things that i'm not completely happy with, but
time's
running out and overall i like it.

Please look at the .png in the zip if you care to, jpeg's suck for quality.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I first started with a rippled plain and a simple triangle mesh...
that eventualy evolved to make use of a pyramid include i found somewhere,
then evolved back to a triangle mesh to simplify things.
then i used terraform to generate a height feild and manipulated it's scaling
till it was something decent for the scene... i kept the plane around for it's
effect in radiosity
made an ambient textured sphere with a spotlight on it and another spotlight
pointing towards the scene FROM it, for the moon
added a larger pyramid in the background, and a smaller one that's hidden
behind
a sand dune.
I played with a sky_sphere, then a texture mapped sky_sphere, and ended up
making
use of Chris Colefax's Galaxy include for the starry sky.
I then decided to make the clouds, which i used several halo's inside spheres
for.
After playing with several ideas for palm trees, i found Derek Owens' plant
Include and settled on it. Good possitioning of the trees proved difficult,
as they take a long time to render(a portable OpenGL povray previewer sure
would be nice), but i'm fairly happy with it.