TITLE: 1st_Fort NAME: Hugh S. Gregory COUNTRY: CANADA EMAIL: hgregory3@aol.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: 1st_fort.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, sPatch, 3D Win, Paintshop Pro Demo Plant Studio RENDER TIME: 16 minutes HARDWARE USED: PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Cast your mind back several centuries, back to the time when safety for a individual was perilous and the only way to protect yourself, your family and friends was to erect stout walls and line them with cannons and heavily armed soldiers. Not just any location is suitable for such a redoubt. Up in the highlands of Scotland one can find many such places that are well sited for defence and at the same time well suited for self supporting agriculture. There are also several that are located on islands in the Lochs or in river estuaries. Thus, the best way to give pause to any potential invader was to locate your Fortress on such an island. With only one possible land approach that ends at a drawbridge. So what you shall see in this month's entry is the view that would confront any traveller who has climbed far into the highlands and through the mountain passes to arrive at your home. Around the lake they would see crops in the fields that support your household, and not so pleasing to behold, a long winding walkway out into the lake, upon which your weapons can be easily be brought to bear. This would discourage the most uncouth of the vile barbarians, who may take it into their fancy to try and "visit" you. To you it is a grand but secure home for you, your family and your retainers. But anyone clearing the mountain passes to descend into your valley, what confronts them is the heavily guarded "1st_Fort". DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my second solo IRTC entry. With the exceptions noted below (where my wife assisted me), all structures and features in this image were built and artistically placed in this image by myself. When the topic was announced in the 1st week of March, memories of our trip through the Scottish highlands back in '95 quickly gave me the inspiration for interpreting this months theme of "Fortress". Stage 1: Again I chose the two stage approach. First I built the fort. Then I built and incorporated the surrounding landscape and vegetation. The Fort was built with CSG's and primitives to come up with a double rampart design (out and inner walls), along with corner turrets, complete with arrow slit windows. Then I spent about a week playing with various textures to try and get the brick work to look "just so". My wife had found and downloaded a lovely texture called "Paver" off an internet site (www.axem2.simplenet) which unfortunately is no longer up. However, I wish to give thanks to the designer of this wonderful texture for having made it available for others to use. Full credit for this texture goes to its designer who posted it to www.axem2.simplenet Stage 2: Next came an Island upon which to rest my fortress and the approach causeway both of which I built in Leveller. Here another texture that my wife found crusing the internet was put to use. I wish to thank and give full credit to Charles Fusner, for it was he who designed the Moray compatible texture "Rough Stone" that I have used for my island and the causeway leading out to the island. My wife Anne then designed and built in Leveller, the rolling hills and mountains you see in the background of the shot. She also designed the Bullrushes you see in the water, lilypads and the plants along side the foot path just in front of the camera view. The bullrushes and lilypads are imported from our joint IRTC entry "Deer Lake" from last years Wilderness theme entry. I then built with primitive cubes and cylinders the boardwalk that sits astride of the causeway and designed and built the cannons. Each plank along the walkway was rotated and redimensioned so that the texture my wife made would not appear to be a series of "photocopies". Next I borrowed with her permission, one of my wifes "Tourist's" from her Blue Mosque entry to the last IRTC still comp and modified it into soldiers and artillery men for my fort's ramparts, complete with faces, helmets, pikes and ramming rods. Next I experimented with various textures to get the "right look" for the backgrounds green crop covered foreground hills and for the more distant higher mountains a scrub covered ground texture. Here I textured the low hills ringing the lake with a mottled look and then installed 4 rows of tall plants along the lake shore, which when distant viewed cleverly deceives the eye into thinking that it is looking at rows and rows of planted fields. With these installed I began "flying" a camera around the 1st_Fort, doing many test renders to find the best place to "shoot" my image from. I finally settled on a view from the south looking north along the causeway with the Sun high over and behind the right shoulder of the camera view to produce an early morning point of view. To complete the image, I made my sky from a squashed sphere, scaled up to 8000 by 8000 by 3000 high. Into this I inserted a plane at about 500 units up to make the low lying layer of clouds. The water texture is a Moray texture "Quiet Water". This I put on a group that contained a stretched and flattened cube for my lake's surface. The 800 by 600 BMP took over 16 minutes to render on POV using my Pentium II - 350. The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with a Demo version of Paint Shop Pro Anne downloaded off the internet set to 5% compression to get the image file down under the IRTC 250kb maximum size. Although there is no longer a image image size limitation, my experience in judging previous rounds has led me to conclude that 800 by 600 does make for ease in displaying the IRTC artwork for examination, so I have decided to stick with the 800 by 600 image size. I Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright "1st_Fort" is Copyright(c)2001, Hugh S. Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.