TITLE: The Sermon
NAME: Mick Hazelgrove
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: mick@mhazelgrove.fsnet.co.uk
WEBPAGE: www.mhazelgrove.fsnet.co.uk
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: preacher.jpg
ZIPFILE: preacher.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    Hammapatch, CorelPaint, 3dWin v4.5, ppmodeller, anim8or, Shelly

RENDER TIME: 
    approx 14 hours,

HARDWARE USED: 
    800mhz Athalon 256mb Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


There is a deserted village on an N.Wales beach that can't be reached by
road. I discovered it many years ago, in my rock climbing days, whilst
looking for new crags to climb on. It is on a beach of huge egg shaped
stones. On this beach are the remains of a wrecked boat. On one of my visits
I found a rock delicately poised on a tangle of rusted beams. I made several
drawings but never got round to painting it. Whilst looking through my
sketchbooks for something to inspire an entry for the worship round of the
IRTC I came across one of those drawings. It was a drawing of a giant eggcup 
made of girders. I was struck by it's resemblance to a giant idol and the 
bizarre idea that gulls might see this as an object to be worship occurred to
me.
On the top of the giant egg is a gull busily berating the others, urging them 
to worship the giant egg or maybe he's a heretic laughing at them and telling 
them it's just a rock!
The pearl is just a play on the saying, "casting pearls before swine," 
a bit of fun really, that I just could not resist.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I've had to learn so much to make this picture
The gulls were modelled in Hamapatch and UV mapped with the help of UV
mapper. I used CorelPaint to paint the maps and then converted the models
into pov with and Thomas Baier's excellent 3Dwin4.5.

The rusty girder was made from extruded splines modelled in anim8or, a
brilliant and free 3ds modeller. The model was imported into ppmodeller and
the mesh distorted and subdivided. The eggs and rocks were made in a similar
way. The whole lot was then converted with 3Dwin 4.5

The clouds are planes, only ten, to keep the render time reasonable and the
shell 
was created in shelly.

This is the first time I've really had a go at using radiosity in an outdoor
scene. The settings are fairly standard. I had to play with diffuse and
ambient to get the right balance of tone and radiosity. One light was used
for the sea otherwise it turned a very strange colour! there are two discs 
either side of the egg one bright pale yellow (ambient 1) 
and one dark purple one for the shadows (ambient.1). 
One of the problems with radiosity in an outdoor scene is that the skysphere
colour dominates the colour of the scene, so I added the two discs to create
colour in the highlights and shadows.

I have not included all the 20 mb of files for the pic but they are 
available on request and some will be going up on my website on it's next
revision.


Mick Hazelgrove