TITLE: THE SNOW FORTRESS
NAME: THORSTEN HAHN
COUNTRY: GERMANY
EMAIL: TWINFIRE_98@YAHOO.COM
TOPIC: FORTRESS
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fs_0104b.jpg
ZIPFILE: fs_0104b.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MEGAPOV 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 

        A KEYBOARD WITHOUT WINDOWS KEYS
        MEGAPOV TEXT-EDITOR
        WINNT 4.0 SP 5
        PSP 4.12

RENDER TIME: 
    01d 14h 20m 43s

HARDWARE USED: 
    PENTIUM II - 400 Mhz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Once upon at time, before the green-house effect. Back then when the green
fields were covered with white and pure snow and I had to make the driveway
free and one slipped out on the walkways to fall into some wet dirty something.
Those were the days when according to Murphy's law the snowball that was to hit
you, contained an ice core or even some pebbels and you ran home, your nose
bleeding your glasses broken the pain covered under your frozen skin because
someone decided to wash your face in fresh (it was at least sometimes fresh)
snow. It was the great age of the snowball battles. It was the age of
snow-castles.
This image you see before you shows you one of these monuments in it's prime.
Soon it will be nothing more than a memory, as the sun breaks through the thick
clowds and make the ice and snow, it was created from, vanish. Some people
might think this is a waste of pixels but some even may recognize it is much
more than that - I mean it is much more - well - a memory to live after us to
remind us of the glorious parts of our childhood when war was a question of
pain, blood and snow and not the question if a Pentium II might slow down our 5
Player Halflife Deathmatch or if I manage to build my nuclear missile before
someone else does it in freeciv. So enough of dumb sub-intelligent writing -
let's get on with the


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

As I saw the topic I first thought of creating a dark and big fortress that
would seem as if it just jumped out of a phantasmagorian nightmare. But then I
reconsidered and came to the conclusion that almost everyone would have gotten
this idea and began to rething my whole concept. Then I came up with the idea
of a snow castle, wich is, as an castle also some kind of fortress and started
to work.

The first part, the castle or fortress itself was created as an heightfield made
with an PSP created greyscale image. So after creating the wall I just cut
pinnacles in by darkening the right parts of my heightfield so it became a much
more fortress- or castle-like look.
To make absolutely clear (and I hope it did) that the image actually shows a
snowmade fortress I placed a kid who is right about to throw a snowball from
behind of his protective shield. Since I only used simple objects such as
spheres and cylinders to create him I think he looks a little bit - well -
poor. But he should have thought of that before he decided to throw snowballs
at people cowardly from behind of some snow-wall.
As for the background I decided to put a house behind the scene. I'm afraid that
I put much more work into this instead of the main topic of the scene but as a
house is a manmade structure and I just love coding these kind of objects (I
think that's the programmer in me) because they are much more rewarding than
people or animals (I should leave them from my scenes or make them otherwise).
Most fun in creating this picture was to make the textures and atmospheres, like
the breath or the smoke out of the chimney, the blue sky and of course the
rendertime-eating almost invisible fog that gives the whole scene the right
look (ok, ok I admit it does nothing but after more than 30 hours of rendering
I didn't want to put it out and rerender the whole thing again).
The real fun with the textures of course is that I always do them try and error
(like I work on software projects) you can maybe imagine what interesting
results I sometimes got.
After placing the windows I realized that there had to be something in the
background just to finish the image. So I thought of the first-place winner of
May-June 2000 (Gena Obukhov - Wilderness) and this wonderful mountains. I took
a look at the included source and began playing around with that isosurface
thing (what besides to the atmospheres makes the image so long to render). I
don't how much of this mountains are real my own work or just copied but they
definetly fit to the image.
The last object, that was added to the scene (maybe because I decided to render
all objects in 1024x768 after that and found out it takes a while) is the small
bavarian flag right on the "tower" standing in front of the fortress and adds a
little bit something to the scene. (I don't know what but it looks nice)