TITLE: Throne NAME: Araldo van de Kraats COUNTRY: The Netherlands EMAIL: a.vandekraats@student.utwente.nl WEBPAGE: - TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: throne.jpg ZIPFILE: throne.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max 3.1 Infinity Textures 1.1 Photoshop 5.5 3ds2pov.exe Windows 2000 RENDER TIME: 4 hours 7 minutes 7 seconds HARDWARE USED: Athlon 550 @ 650, 128 Mb IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Thousands of years ago, there was a mighty emperor who reigned a vast part of what we now call Asia. His people loved and worshiped him, even hundreds of years after his dead. This is an image of the throne of this sovereign. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used 3D Studio for the more complex models. One technique I used a lot is lofting. For example the curves at the top of the pillars and the border of the back of the throne where made with lofting. Another technique I used in 3D Studio is making a lathe of an Bezier curve. For example the candlesticks and the bottom of the pillars, are lathe objects. Other things I used to model things in 3D Studio is Editable Mesh (for example the red material of the throne). The Flower-like object at the top of the pillar is made, using NURBS. The 3D Studio models where exported to 3ds files, and converted to POV-Ray format, using 3ds2pov.exe. Because this is the first POV-Ray project I did, using 3D Studio models, I didn't know the mesh object should be used for the imported triangles, instead of union (in this case, union is not accurate, very slow and consumes a LOT of memory). It took I while to discover this. I did not include the files with the imported meshes, because I think they are to large (about 36 Mb). You can email me if you want to see them. The gems where modeled by using a difference of a sphere and some rotated planes. The sinuous shape at the back of the throne is made by a few thounsand cylinders which are scaled with a sinus function. I made a macro file to create boxes and cylinders with rounded edges. The rest of the shapes are mostly simple POV-Ray primitives, often used in combination with loops. After I modeled everything, I only had two days left for texturing. For the wall in the back I got a stone texture from 3D Cafe. I used photoshop to edit an bump_map for the wall. The moon is an sphere with an picture of a moon on it. I used light_sources with fading power, to prevent the other lights in the scene from illuminate the shadow side of the moon. The textures for the pillar, is an simple marble texture with a color_map. The floor is a checker pattern, with textures from stones.inc. The gold textures where taken from golds.inc. The starfield I made with Infinty Textures and Photoshop. The bottom of the throne is a modified texture from stones.inc. The seat is also an texture from stones.inc. To illuminate the scene I used three area lights and a simple light for the moon. I rendered the picture at 1024x768, because at 800x600 too much detail was lost.