TITLE: XVI The Tower
NAME: Tina S.
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: youknow@ucan.foad.org
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: xvitower.jpg
ZIPFILE: xvitower.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.7 (Windows)

TOOLS USED: 
    IfranView (conversion to JPG)
  More coffee than you want to think about

RENDER TIME: 
    Between 9-10 hours (exact time not noted)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 400MHz/128M RAM (development)
               Athlon 1.2Ghz/256 RAM (final render)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Revolution. Cataclysm. Disruption. Calamity. Disaster. Transformation.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Yes, this is long. For those of you who hate long files, here's a quick
summary version:

Tower: isosurface blocks with noise, with some CSG applied to make
  windows and broken side.
Flames: Blobs w/media, overlapped.
Clouds: A big hollow sphere, which also clips the 
  Water (and the surface under the water): boxes
Moon: Textured sphere (corona is with a sky_sphere pattern)
Rock (under tower): isosurface (box + big noise) with slope pattern
Card face: Boxes + text object
Three light sources (one for flames, one for moon, one to illuminate
  the card face with a high fade so it wouldn't hit other scene objects).
Radiosity. Hence the reason I borrowed a friend's machine to do the
  final render.

This is the first time I've regretted the 250k size limit -- or, I
suppose more importantly, the requirement for JPG. There's a bit of color
banding in the clouds and on the rock that is a JPG artifact.

... Long version begins 

I had originally been thinking doing a broken-down castle, and was
sketching the tower when this idea came to me. The question of what
exactly it should look like took very little time; I had a clear image in
my head from the start. Getting there, on the other hand, was not
necessarily as easy.

After some experimentation with some various isosurface objects (and 
some helpful technical advice from the friendly denizens of the povray 
newsgroups), I managed to come up with a number of worn bricks (which 
given the night-time scene may have been overkill; the details of the 
wear aren't very visible) that I liked. With a bit of searching, I found 
out how to make said bricks circle correctly (for a time, I thought I 
might have to resort to square bricks since the rotation was what was 
stumping me), and with a bit more experimentation figured out how to 
layer them so they were not in vertical lines. A bit of CSG, and I had 
a tower with windows.

Then I spent about five million years working on flames. Or maybe it just
seemed that way. I started out with cones and patterns, and then one day,
when discussing the results with a friend, she suggested organic shapes.
Hence: blobs. There are three basic shapes, all blob-composed, used in
various rotation and scale. Media seems to interact slightly oddly with
blobs; the same density map that worked well with a cone produces somewhat
paler flames than I would like. Still, I think this is the best choice,
something to play with later. There's a light source in the center of the
flames.

With most of what I needed already reasonably worked out, I put together
the basic scene (sans "card"): the tower (hanging in mid-air; I knew I was
going to put something under it, but wasn't sure what yet), water (and an
underwater surface), a sky sphere. The result was not quite what I was
after, which led to a few changes.

The first one was replacing the cloud-bearing sky_sphere with a plain
sky-colored one, and adding a very large (and thick) hollow sphere to
which the clouds were applied... and then adding a moon. I'd always
planned on it being a moonlit scene, but it wasn't til this point that I
realized the moon really ought to be -visible-.

To go along with this, I changed my water (and the bed of the sea) to
boxes cut off by the inner aspect of the cloud sphere. This worked much
better with the textures chosen.

I mulled over a few choices for what the tower support should look like,
and ultimately decided on a mossy, crumbling rock to go with the wear 
on the tower.

...and speaking of wear on the tower, it occurred to me that what was
missing was visible damage to the tower. Add a bit more CSG.

Now spend a week and a half tweaking things (mostly textures) and add the
card face (a little tricky to get it to line up right). 

Then work swallowed my life. Ultimately, I'm fairly satisfied with the
image, but I think I might have done a few more things with more time:

1) I'm still not sure I shouldn't have had the clouds on a flat plane as
well as in the sphere. I probably would've had to tweak the moon to do
this right, however; the moon-cloud interaction is on the low side at the
moment, something else I might hvae played with more.

2) There's no smoke. I would've added it.

3) The flames are still a bit too transparent at the edges; they only take
on real volume where superimposed on other flames. Likewise, while the
color is reasonable, it's a bit -too- regular, I think. I suspect part of
the solution here would've been more complex blobs, and it's entirely
possible adding a bit of pigment to the blob itself would help.

4) I thought about putting sills of some sort on the windows, or outlining
them with bricks, but I'm not sure that's really necessary. I would've
liked the time to try it, though.

5) I think I would've liked to make the waves less regular, but never got
the time to further tweak that, either.

I'm still not sure the sea stretching out into the distance is the best
option, but that one was deliberate, rather than lack of time. I had
considered adding some other rocks and maybe a distant land at the
horizon, but I kind of like the vast, empty sea feel, too.