TITLE: Southern Outpost NAME: Jason Fisher EMAIL: jlfishe1@uiuc.edu TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: outpost6.jpg ZIPFILE: outpost6.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g TOOLS USED: TREES version 3.0 written by Sonya Roberts RENDER TIME: 43 min. 47 sec. HARDWARE USED: 500 MHz Pentum III w/ 256 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: During the year 1150, in a world of fantasy not like our own, the Wolfen kind banded together with the intent of wiping out all other sentient life on the continent of Forestall. The other races were cuaght badly unprepared for such an invasion and the humans were still colonizing the continent. Thus the wolfen made much initial progress. But by 1151 the humans and other races put up an effective resistance. The war dragged on for four more years and the wolfen finally relented and withrew. In 1160, the humans formed a kingdom riding on the momentum of the war. So that humans would not again be caught off guard, Duke Otto von Flechandand established six outposts were, each about a days ride from the three major Bavrhand citadels. However, the extreme circumstances that caused the formation of the kingdom abated and peace again settled on Forestall. With the death of King Donato the kingdom fell apart into its three dutchies. Because they were no longer needed, most of those outposts fell into total dissrepair by 1220. However, because the southernmost one was close to a major trade route it was saved from this fate. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The outpost is just a collection of superellipsoid objects, rotated and tranlated into the appropriate places, except for the door which is a small collection of boxes with a wooden texture. The birch trees and bushes were created using the TREES utility, written by Sonya Roberts. That utility produces pretty convincing trees and the brich bark texture that comes with it is pretty good as well, but I specified the texture the leaves on the trees and bushes and the texture for the bark on the twigs and branches of the bushes. It was pretty hard to come up with a realistic texture for the leaves, especially on the bushes near the camera. I'm still not totally happy with what I used, but I just can't come up with with a simple pattern that looks any better. And I don't want to use anything too complicated because when it is applied to the many thousands of leaves in the scene it could add alot of time to the rendering. The ground is a height field made from the hillside.tga file and textured with a simple wrinkles type pattern. The fade to dirt around the outpost and the trail leading away from it was made with another height field that was placed on a flat spot in the first hieght field and then textured with a gradient type pigment map pattern. Finally, the whole thing was rendered at 1024x768 with an AA value of 0.3, to get rid of all of the little nasties and sharp edges. All in all, it's pretty simple, but there was alot of work put into getting the textures on the trees to look decent and in makeing the height fields base images do what I wanted them to.