TITLE: Attack on the Golden City
NAME: Antoine Valentim
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: bumblebee@globalserve.net
WEBPAGE: http://web.globalserve.net/~bumblebee/ecclesia/ecclesia.htm
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: goldcity.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    The GIMP (heightfields, JPEG conversion), Kerlin Softworks' Gradient
Thief 

RENDER TIME: 
    2h 37m 44s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 433

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The Golden City lies alone, self-sufficient, in the middle of the desert. 
Although the desert surrounding the city is extremely dry, the citizens of the
city harvest water from the air and are thus able to grow the food they need in
the floating garden they have set up in the moat surrounding the city. 
 
Although those who live in the City lead a good life, their neighbors inhabiting
the surrounding desert have grown envious of the City for its riches in water. 
Some of them have banded together to launch an attack.  The City seems, to all
appearances, to be defenseless against modern weaponry - stone walls offer no
protection against missiles.  Victory seemed assured.

Once the missile attack was launched, however, the ancient defenses put into
place by the City's founders awoke, releasing a cloud of robot drones to
annihilate the missiles before they could reach their target...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The walls and towers were made out of boxes, and connected together in
concentric circles.  

The hills are a heightfield made with the GIMP (Render/Clouds/Solid Noise), and
then a suitable location was selected and flattened (for the city).  The
gardens are also a heightfield, drawn in a "rectangular" shape and converted to
polar coordinates to make it round (using the 
GIMP, once again).  The city itself is also a heightfield, which had to be
tweaked to get it looking somewhat right. The city was originally gray, but the
"Arabesque" thread in povray.text.scene-files gave me the idea of trying a
pigment map, making the city a little more colorful. 

The missiles are CSG.  The smoke trails are spheres on a line, randomly moved
and sized.  The color of the smoke trails was figured out with some help from
the program "Gradient Thief", which I used to look at the colors of a Space
Shuttle's exhaust.

The sky is a skysphere, a modified version of S_Cloud1.

I added a fog too...

The light source is mainly red, simulating a sunrise or sunset.

That's about it.