TITLE: Norden's point of wiev
NAME: Timo Jousimo
COUNTRY: Finland
EMAIL: howitzer@operamail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.thehowitzer.cjb.net
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: norden2.jpg
ZIPFILE: norden2.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray for Windows v3.3

RENDER TIME: 
    5h 32min 37s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 2 300MHz / 352 MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I had been created most of this image already when I got the final idea. I was
reading one gaming magazine and there was a rewiev of the game "B-17 Flying
Fortress 2". That rewiev included a picture of a Norden bombardment targetting
system and there I got an idea. Because my creation looked a kind of a boring
and casual and it seemed to not have much of originality, I decided to move the
camera to top of the fortress and create the Norden around it. Now it looked
much better for me.
It's easy to see that my picture can't describe the B-17's point of wiev when
targetting, because there's the helipad and doors of missile silos. I don't
even really care if it's realistic (was Norden used when there was nuclear
missiles or helicopters?) but still it looks much cooler this way. Earlier I
tried to make a wiev from a TV-camera of a cruise missile, just before the hit,
but I couldn't find a way to make it look good.
The base itself is some kind of a nuclear missile base located in a coastline.
Someone has built it and someone else considers it a threat so it needs to be
wiped out.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started with creating the landscape. I found that heightfield is best way to
create the landscape so I used few hours for creation of template. I edited
this template few times so that it better fits to scene. Next thing was the
water. I tried many things, and result was that there's no very good way to
create realistic-looking water in Moray. Finally I created a large bezier patch
and stretched it to wawes. Then I flattened wawes around the barriers. Finally,
I created the texture that is reflective, partially transparent and bumpmapped.
I also added a hollow sphere with a sky-texture so that the water would reflect
the sky, like water does in real life. I'm not very satisfied with the water,
but it's the best I could do for now. Maybe I could have done better if I had
had more time.
Next phase was creating the fortress itself. It's mainly made of primitives and
CSG's. Some spline objects were also used but there's only few dozens of those
(11564 frame level objects total.) The radar dish in top of the larger building
and in the guard tower (see the another-perspective wiev picture included
within in source files) are taken from a space-ship I created in last january.
All other objects are created specifically for this scene. Textures were also
created mostly for this scene, altough some of them are taken from Moray
texture library and then modified for my purposes.
Finally I created the Norden. It's simply one rotational sweep, few cylinders
and couple hunderd cubes and they are aligned in front of the camera so that it
looks like wiev trough Norden.
Textures are mostly very simple. Many of them are only one solid color, few is
also bumpmapped. With them, there's couple of those with colormap pattern or
few layers.