TITLE: Dover Castle and the White Cliffs of Dover NAME: Peter Murray COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ TOPIC: Landmarks COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pdmdcstl.jpg ZIPFILE: pdmdcstl.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1b4 Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: English Heritage video about Dover Castle Adobe Photoshop for painting heightfields, adding credits, JPEG conversion Graphic Convertor for converting PICT heightfields to GIF Deskdraw for sketching the idea RENDER TIME: 0 hours 23 minutes 42.0 seconds (1422 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The White Cliffs of Dover with the castle, pharos and church DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The moral is: Pick your subject early, don't change your mind about the viewpoints four times in the last three days, and don't keep tinkering with the details in the hours before the deadline. My original idea was very similar to my idea for the "Time" round (which I didn't actually enter). I intended to render an object representing a landmark event in front of Dover Castle, a different sort of landmark. Then I had some other ideas, and gave up on that one. Then I went back to the Dover Castle idea, intending to show it as a landmark in itself from a viewpoint matching that in an old photo, but then it changed to a view of the White Cliffs of Dover seen from the sea, and then..... Ah, you don't want to know :-) . The heightfield for this image was painted over an enlarged screengrab of a plan view of this site, taken from the video mentioned under "Tools Used". I revised it a few times, and went back to the last-but-two version because the last two revisions made it worse and even worse. Every time I do something to it today, it seems to get worse! I've gone back to an earlier viewpoint of the scene, as it was better than any of the later ones. There aren't nearly enough buildings on the top of the cliff. From left to right, there's the Norman keep of the castle, the Victorian restoration of the old church of St Mary-in-Castro, and the Roman pharos or lighthouse, repaired in mediaeval times. None of these are more detailed than they needed to be for this image - they may be less detailed than they should have been! The render finished about 1:10am, which is late enough that I can't cope with yet another render tonight, even at 23 minutes a render. I've just realised how I could have incorporated the credits into the scene :-( . And I've realised what caused the odd-coloured patch at bottom right :-( . Background info on the landmarks: 1 The White Cliffs have been there for ages and ages and ages! 2 The Pharos was built in Roman times, presumably in the first century AD, and was repaired in the Middle Ages. 3 The church basically dates back to Anglo-Saxon times but was extensively restored in the 19th century. 4 There was a hill fort on the cliffs in the Iron Age, before Caesar tried to invade Britain in 55BC. The Normans strengthened whatever Saxon defences were there in the late 11th century, and then built a new keep. It was updated in the 16th century to take cannon, and more improvements followed, up to the addition of machine gun nests during the Second World War, plus an underground command post, and underground bunkers during the Cold War. It's therefore been a military site for over 2000 years, and this picture doesn't do any of that justice :-( . Oh, the heightfield is about 300K so I haven't included it in the zip file.